world outside to answer to his own feelings, and was every turn
to be fresh disappointment? Why was life so mysteriously hard?
This country itself was sad, he thought, looking about him,-and
you could no more change that than you could change the story in
an unhappy human face. He wished to God he were sick again; the
world was too rough a place to get about in.

There was one person in the world who felt sorry for Claude that
night. Gladys Farmer sat at her bedroom window for a long while,
watching the stars and thinking about what she had seen plainly
enough that afternoon. She had liked Enid ever since they were
little girls,--and knew all there was to know about her. Claude
would become one of those dead people that moved about the
streets of Frankfort; everything that was Claude would perish,
and the shell of him would come and go and eat and sleep for
fifty years. Gladys had taught the children of many such dead
men. She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of
strong convictions and confused figures. She believed that all
things which might make the world beautiful--love and kindness,
leisure and art--were shut up in prison, and that successful men
like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys. The generous ones, who would
let these things out to make people happy, were somehow weak, and
could not break the bars. Even her own little life was squeezed
into an unnatural shape by the domination of people like Bayliss.
She had not dared, for instance, to go to Omaha that spring for
the three performances of the Chicago Opera Company. Such an
extravagance would have aroused a corrective spirit in all her
friends, and in the schoolboard as well; they would probably have
decided not to give her the little increase in salary she counted
upon having next year.

There were people, even in Frankfort, who had imagination and
generous impulses, but they were all, she had to admit,
inefficient--failures. There was Miss Livingstone, the fiery,
emotional old maid who couldn't tell the truth; old Mr. Smith, a
lawyer without clients, who read Shakespeare and Dryden all day
long in his dusty office; Bobbie Jones, the effeminate drug
clerk, who wrote free verse and "movie" scenarios, and tended the
sodawater fountain.

Claude was her one hope. Ever since they graduated from High
School, all through the four years she had been teaching, she had
waited to see him emerge and prove himself. She wanted him to be
more successful