of the right sort,
gayety, sympathy, enthusiasm. Angela had some of this, when she was not
troubled about anything, his parents, his sister, his old acquaintances
had a little more to offer. They could not, however, be forever talking
to him or paying him attention, and beyond them there was nothing. The
town had no resources. Eugene would walk the long country roads with
Angela or go boating or fishing sometimes, but still he was lonely. He
would sit on the porch or in the hammock and think of what he had seen
in London and Paris--how he might be at work. St. Paul's in a mist, the
Thames Embankment, Piccadilly, Blackfriars Bridge, the muck of
Whitechapel and the East End--how he wished he was out of all this and
painting them. If he could only paint. He rigged up a studio in his
father's barn, using a north loft door for light and essayed certain
things from memory, but there was no making anything come out right. He
had this fixed belief, which was a notion purely, that there was always
something wrong. Angela, his mother, his father, whom he occasionally
asked for an opinion, might protest that it was beautiful or wonderful,
but he did not believe it. After a few altering ideas of this kind,
under the influences of which he would change and change and change
things, he would find himself becoming wild in his feelings, enraged at
his condition, intensely despondent and sorry for himself.

"Well," he would say, throwing down his brush, "I shall simply have to
wait until I come out of this. I can't do anything this way." Then he
would walk or read or row on the lakes or play solitaire, or listen to
Angela playing on the piano that his father had installed for Myrtle
long since. All the time though he was thinking of his condition, what
he was missing, how the gay world was surging on rapidly elsewhere, how
long it would be before he got well, if ever. He talked of going to
Chicago and trying his hand at scenes there, but Angela persuaded him to
rest for a while longer. In June she promised him they would go to
Blackwood for the summer, coming back here in the fall if he wished, or
going on to New York or staying in Chicago, just as he felt about it.
Now he needed rest.

"Eugene will probably be all right by then," Angela volunteered to his
mother, "and he can make up his mind whether he wants to go to Chicago
or London."

She was very proud of her ability to talk of where they would go and
what they would do.