. For thirty years these flowers had sprung
up valiantly every spring in that bleak strip of earth, and for thirty
years Cyrus had spat among them while he smoked alone on the back porch
on June afternoons.

While he sat there a great peace enfolded and possessed him. The street
beyond the sagging wooden gate was still; the house behind him was
still; the kitchen, in which showed the ebony silhouette of a massive
cook kneading dough, was still with the uncompromising stillness of the
Sabbath. In the midst of this stillness, his thoughts, which were
usually as angular as lean birds on a bough, lost their sharpness of
outline and melted into a vague and feathery mass. At the moment it was
impossible to know of what he was thinking, but he was happy with the
happiness which visits men of small parts and of sterile imagination. By
virtue of these limitations and this sterility he had risen out of
obscurity--for the spiritual law which decrees that to gain the world
one must give up one's soul, was exemplified in him as in all his
class. Success, the shibboleth of his kind, had controlled his thoughts
and even his impulses so completely for years that he had come at last
to resemble an animal less than he resembled a machine; and Nature (who
has a certain large and careless manner of dispensing justice) had
punished him in the end by depriving him of the ordinary animal capacity
for pleasure. The present state of vacuous contentment was, perhaps, as
near the condition of enjoyment as he would ever approach.

Half an hour before he had had an encounter with Susan on the subject of
her going to college, but even his victory, which had been sharp and
swift, was robbed of all poignant satisfaction by his native inability
to imagine what his refusal must have meant to her. The girl had stood
straight and tall, with her commanding air, midway between the railing
and the weather-stained door of the house.

"Father, I want to go to college," she had said quite simply, for she
was one who used words very much as Cyrus used money, with a
temperamental avoidance of all extravagance.

Her demand was a direct challenge to the male in Cyrus, and, though this
creature could not be said to be either primitive or predatory, he was
still active enough to defend himself from the unprovoked assault of an
offspring.

"Tut-tut," he responded. "If you want something to occupy you, you'd
better start about helping your mother with her preservi