d that after all I had hurried unnecessarily, for the financial
problem forces itself even into the seventh heaven of love, and now it
came like a ghoul to devour my happiness. It assumed concrete form in
a picture of Doctor Todd when I went to him empty-handed, and I could
not help feeling that it would have been better had I not let suspicion
and jealousy hurry me to the attainment of what could have been mine a
year later under less embarrassing circumstances.

My moment of abstraction was quickly noticed. Gladys Todd wanted to
know my troubles. They were hers now, she said, for thenceforth we
must share our burdens. I rose, for I was young. I laughed, and with
my laugh the clouds were swept away, for no cloud could veil the
sunshine from my heart when the big sketch-book was under my right arm
and her small hand was under my left arm as we walked together down
that clover-carpeted lane.

CHAPTER XII

I have travelled far in my life, travelled the seven seas by sail and
steam, and on horse and camel crossed plain and desert. The Pacific,
the Indies, the Arctic--I count over the coasts where my ships have
cast anchor; I go back in my memory to the first foreign shores on
which my eyes rested, and you perhaps will smile when I tell you that
they were the Jersey meadows. I saw them from a car window on a June
evening. The train had crossed the bridge at Newark, and below me in
the river lay ships--tiny coasters, I know now, but then in the dusk
magnified for me to the dignity of world-wanderers. In the salt vapors
of the marshes I scented the sea and the far-borne aroma of the
tropics, the lands of palm and spice, and I looked away to the
encircling hills and their scattered lights with something of the
exultation of Columbus when he spied the blazing torch which marked the
New World. This was a new world to me. I had known only the inland,
little valleys where life moved as placidly as the little rivers which
threaded them. Now the sight of mast and spar, the salt vapors, the
far-spread lights told me that I had come to a strange land, and I was
eager to reach its heart and to see its mysteries. I was keyed high
with the hope of conquest. With the salt marshes behind me, I left
behind me, too, the Old World, the little valleys, the placid streams,
and very straight I was, and very self-confident, when at last I looked
across the dark river to the towering shadow of the city, pierced by
its myriad