ing, "to
stay?"

"No," said Jeff. "Esther doesn't want to stay. We mustn't think of
that."

"I am sorry," said the colonel, and Lydia understood him perfectly. He
was not sorry Esther had gone. But he was sorry the whole business had
been so muddled from the start, and that Jeff's life could not have
moved on like Addington lives in general: placid, all of a piece. Lydia
thought this yearning of his for the complete and perfect was because he
was old. She felt quite capable of taking Jeff's life as it was, and
fitting it together in a striking pattern.

"Come in, Farvie," she said. "You haven't corrected Mary Nellen's
translation."

Jeff was being left alone for his own good, and he smiled after the kind
little schemer, before he took his hat and went down town to find Weedon
Moore. As he went, withdrawn into a solitariness of his own, so that he
only absently answered the bows of those he met, he thought curiously
about his own life. And he was thinking as his father had: his life was
not of a pattern. It was a succession of disjointed happenings. There
was the first wild frothing of the yeast of youth. There was the nemesis
who didn't like youth to make such a fool of itself. She had to throw
him into prison. While he was there he had actually seemed to do things
that affected prison discipline. He was mentioned outside. He was even,
because he could write, absurdly pardoned. It had seemed to him then
desirable to write the life of a gentleman criminal, but in that he had
quite lost interest. Then he had had his great idea of liberty: the
freedom of the will that saved men from being prisoners. But the squalid
tasks remained to him even while he bragged of being free: to warn Moore
away from meddling with women's names, no matter how Madame Beattie
might invite him to do her malicious will, to warn Madame Beattie even,
in some fashion, and to protect Lydia. Of Esther he could not think,
save in a tiring, bewildered way. She seemed, from the old habit of
possession justified by a social tie, somehow a part of him, a burden of
which he could never rid himself and therefore to be borne patiently,
since he could not know whether the burden were actually his or not. And
he began to be conscious after that morning when Esther had looked at
him with primitive woman's summons to the protecting male that Esther
was calling him. Sometimes it actually tired him as if he were running
in answer to the call, whether toward it