with unwholesome brooding. I seemed to move through waste places, with
no object to catch the eye and thought and to drive away the
consciousness of my unhappiness. Even my walk on Fifth Avenue had been
abandoned lest at any moment Penelope might pass me with Talcott at her
side; Miss Minion's had become a place of terror, for by ill chance Tom
Marshall had been introduced to Talcott and he had developed a habit of
dropping in on me and telling me what he had said to Bert Talcott and
what Bert Talcott had said to him. He seemed to think that Talcott had
conferred knighthood on him by knowing him. There were times, even,
when I had gravely considered abandoning my chosen career and retiring
to a bucolic life of loneliness in the valley. And at other times,
into such depths of despondency was I plunged that I could seriously
consider abandoning self entirely and devoting the remainder of my
wrecked life to doing good, though just what trend my saintliness would
take I never determined. In monkish days, I suppose, I should have
gone into a cloister. But Hanks aroused me. Of course he did not know
my thoughts. With his clear eyes he did not see that my life was a
ruin. He regarded me rather as a fortunate man to whom opportunities
were opening wonderfully well, and I accepted his view; though I was
sure that I was taking a road which led to nowhere, yet travelling was
better than sitting still. Looking at Hanks, I forgot that he had a
wife and four accomplished daughters over in Jersey, and I said that I
should take life as he took it, with a cynical interest in the game,
with all thought on the run of the cards and little for personal
winnings.

When I had cleared my desk for my successor and had bidden good-by to
my old known tasks, I found myself turning to the new and unknown with
more interest than I had believed myself capable of showing. So much
was to be done in those three days that I had little time for
self-condolence. One day had to be taken for a farewell to my parents;
and what a day it was, with my father and mother driving down to
Pleasantville in the late night to meet me that they might not lose one
moment of my visit! Only when I slept were they from my side, for my
mother's mind was filled with all the stories of shipwreck that she had
ever read, and my father had doubts as to whether or not the moral
environment of London was such as he would ask for his son. My father
never had much fa