chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so
much more important to be a certain sort of man.

His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking of the
Catholic Church. The idea was strong in him that there was a certain
intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary, and
religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite conceivably it was an
empty ritual but it was seemingly the only assimilative, traditionary
bulwark against the decay of morals. Until the great mobs could be
educated into a moral sense some one must cry: "Thou shalt not!" Yet
any acceptance was, for the present, impossible. He wanted time and
the absence of ulterior pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without
ornaments, realize fully the direction and momentum of this new start.

*****

The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden
beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting
sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a
graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a
new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere. On an impulse he considered
trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of
a hill; a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy
watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the
touch with a sickening odor.

Amory wanted to feel "William Dayfield, 1864."

He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow
he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the broken columns
and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied that
in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to
whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite passionately
that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It
seemed strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made
him think of dead loves and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the
rest, even to the yellowish moss.

*****

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible,
with here and there a late-burning light--and suddenly out of the clear
darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit
of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the
muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes
and half-forgotten dreams