ed him he looked changed--beaten and
broken, older. In spite of myself I pitied him now, and a confused
uneasiness, almost remorse, came over me at the way I had opposed him.
"What's come over Dad?" I wondered. Once I saw him look at my mother,
and his look was frightened, crushed. What was it she had told him?

Those evenings I read "Pendennis" aloud for the third time to my mother.
It had been our favorite book, and I took anxious pains to show her how
I loved it still. But once chancing to look quickly up, I caught my
mother watching me with a hungriness and an utter despair such as I'd
never seen before. It struck me cold, I looked away--and suddenly I
realized what a selfish little beast I was, beside this woman who loved
me so and whom I was now leaving. My throat contracted sharply. But when
I looked back the look was gone, and in its place was a quiet smile.

"Oh, my boy, you must do fine work," she said. "I want it so much more
than anything else in my whole life. In my whole life," she repeated. I
came over to her chair, bent over her and kissed her hard.

"I'm sorry I'm going! I'm sorry!" I whispered. "But mammy! It's only for
a year!"

Why did that make her cling to me so? If only she had told me.

But what young egotists we sons are. It was only a few days later that
with my two college chums, from the deck of an ocean liner, I said
good-by to the harbor.

"Thank God I'm through with you at last."

CHAPTER IX

I was in Paris for two years.

In those first weeks of deep delight I called it, "The Beautiful City of
Grays." For this town was certainly mellowed down. No jar of an ugly
present here, no loud disturbing harbor. But on the other hand, no
dullness of a fossilized past. What college had been supposed to do this
city did, it took the past and made it alive, richly, thrillingly alive,
and wove it in with the present. In the first Sorbonne lectures, even
with my meager French, I felt this at once, I wanted to feel it. These
profs were brilliant, sparkling, gay. They talked as though Rousseau and
Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert, Maupassant and all the rest were
still vital dazzling news to the world, because these men were still
molding the world. And from here exploring out over the town, I was
smilingly greeted everywhere by such affable gracious old places, that
seemed to say:

"We've been written about for a thousand years, and now you also wish to
write. How charming of you. P