to stop her? No.
What good would it do? Wings of the Eagles, Rome reborn. That was it, she
had hit it, struck the keynote of this new age. Rome reborn, all clean,
old-fashioned Christian living swept away by millions of men at each
others' throats like so many wolves. And at last quite openly to himself
Roger admitted that he felt old. Old and beaten, out of date. Moments
passed, and hours--he took little note of time. Nor did he see on the
mantle the dark visage of "The Thinker" there, resting on the huge clinched
fist and brooding down upon him. Lower, imperceptibly, he sank into his
leather chair.

Quiet had returned to his house.

CHAPTER XXXIV

But the quiet was dark to Roger now. Each night he spent in his study
alone, for instinctively he felt the need of being by himself for a while,
of keeping away from his children--out of whose lives he divined that other
events would soon come forth to use up the last of the strength that was in
him.

And Roger grew angry with the world. Why couldn't it let a man alone, an
old man in a silent house alive for him with memories? Repeatedly in such
hours his mind would go groping backward into the years behind him. What a
long and winding road, half buried in the jungle, dim, almost impenetrable,
made up of millions of small events, small worries, plans and dazzling
dreams, with which his days had all been filled. But the more he recalled
the more certain he grew that he was right. Life had never been like this:
the world had never come smashing into his house, his very family, with its
dirty teeming tenements, its schools, its prisons, electric chairs, its
feverish rush for money, its luxuries, its scandals. These things had
existed in the world, but remote and never real, mere things which he had
read about. War? Did he not remember wars that had come and gone in Europe?
But they hadn't come into his home like this, first making him poor when he
needed money for Edith and her children, then plunging Deborah into a
struggle which might very probably ruin her life, and now taking Laura and
filling her mind with thoughts of pagan living. Why was every man, woman
and child, these days, bound up in the whole life of the world? What would
come of it all? A new day out of this deafening night? Maybe so. But for
him it would come too late.

"What have I left to live for?"

One night with a sigh he went to his desk, lit a cigar and laid his hand
upon a pile of letters w