gardly commission, and was using lighter structural material
than he thought proper. He had vexations enough, too, with his work at
home. He had several bridges under way in the United States, and they
were always being held up by strikes and delays resulting from a general
industrial unrest.

Though Alexander often told himself he had never put more into his work
than he had done in the last few years, he had to admit that he had
never got so little out of it. He was paying for success, too, in the
demands made on his time by boards of civic enterprise and committees
of public welfare. The obligations imposed by his wife's fortune
and position were sometimes distracting to a man who followed his
profession, and he was expected to be interested in a great many worthy
endeavors on her account as well as on his own. His existence was
becoming a network of great and little details. He had expected that
success would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought only power
that was in itself another kind of restraint. He had always meant to
keep his personal liberty at all costs, as old MacKeller, his first
chief, had done, and not, like so many American engineers, to become a
part of a professional movement, a cautious board member, a Nestor de
pontibus. He happened to be engaged in work of public utility, but he
was not willing to become what is called a public man. He found himself
living exactly the kind of life he had determined to escape. What, he
asked himself, did he want with these genial honors and substantial
comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork
had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle life which
confronted him,--of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was
like being buried alive. In his youth he would not have believed such a
thing possible. The one thing he had really wanted all his life was to
be free; and there was still something unconquered in him, something
besides the strong work-horse that his profession had made of him. He
felt rich to-night in the possession of that unstultified survival;
in the light of his experience, it was more precious than honors or
achievement. In all those busy, successful years there had been nothing
so good as this hour of wild light-heartedness. This feeling was the
only happiness that was real to him, and such hours were the only ones
in which he could feel his own continuous identity--feel the boy he had
been in the