came out of it in a more or less unrecognizable condition, but Martin
reestablished his reputation and presently entered Yale free from the
suspicion of being anything but a first-rate sportsman and an
indisputable man.

There Martin had played football with all the desired bullishness. He
had hammered ragtime on the piano like the best ordinary man in the
University. With his father he rode to hounds hell for leather, and he
wrote comic stuff in a Yale magazine which made him admiringly regarded
as a sort of junior George Ade. It was only in secret, and then with a
sneaking sense of shame, that he allowed his idealistic side to feed on
Browning and Ruskin, Maeterlinck and Barrie, and only when alone on
vacation that he bathed in the beauty of French cathedrals, sat
thrilled and stirred by the waves of melody of the great composers,
drew up curiously touched and awed at the sight of the places in the
famous cities of Europe that echoed with the footsteps of history.

If the ideality of that boy had been seized upon and developed by a
sympathetic hand, if his lively imagination and passion for the
beautiful had been put through a proper educational course, he might
have used the latent creative power with which nature had endowed him
and taken a high place among artists, writers or composers. As it was,
his machinelike, matter-of-fact training and his own self-conscious
anxiety not to be different from the average good sportsman had made
him conform admirably to type. He was a fine specimen of the eager,
naive, quick-witted, clean-minded young American, free from "side,"
devoid of mannerisms, determined to make the utmost of life and its
possibilities.

It is true that when death seized upon the man who was brother and pal
as well as father to Martin, all the stucco beneath which he had so
carefully hidden his spiritual and imaginative side cracked and broke.
Under the indescribable shock of what seemed to him to be wanton and
meaningless cruelty, the boy gave way to a grief that was angry and
agonized by turns. He had left a fit, high-spirited father to drive to
a golf shop to buy a new mashie, returned to take him out to Sleepy
Hollow for a couple of rounds--and found him stretched out on the floor
of the library, dead. Was it any wonder that he tortured himself with
unanswerable questions, sat for hours in the dark trying with the most
pitiful futility to fathom the riddle of life, or that he wandered
aimlessly ab