e's illusions, and leaves a new hope
for the future in our hearts.

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.

BASS RIVER, MASS.,
July, 10, 1918.

CHAPTER I

The landlady, Madame Lemercier, left me alone in my room, after a short
speech impressing upon me all the material and moral advantages of the
Lemercier boarding-house.

I stopped in front of the glass, in the middle of the room in which I
was going to live for a while. I looked round the room and then at
myself.

The room was grey and had a dusty smell. I saw two chairs, one of
which held my valise, two narrow-backed armchairs with smeary
upholstery, a table with a piece of green felt set into the top, and an
oriental carpet with an arabesque pattern that fairly leaped to the
eye.

This particular room I had never seen before, but, oh, how familiar it
all was--that bed of imitation mahogany, that frigid toilet table, that
inevitable arrangement of the furniture, that emptiness within those
four walls.

The room was worn with use, as if an infinite number of people had
occupied it. The carpet was frayed from the door to the window--a path
trodden by a host of feet from day to day. The moulding, which I could
reach with my hands, was out of line and cracked, and the marble
mantelpiece had lost its sharp edges. Human contact wears things out
with disheartening slowness.

Things tarnish, too. Little by little, the ceiling had darkened like a
stormy sky. The places on the whitish woodwork and the pink wallpaper
that had been touched oftenest had become smudgy--the edge of the door,
the paint around the lock of the closet and the wall alongside the
window where one pulls the curtain cords. A whole world of human
beings had passed here like smoke, leaving nothing white but the
window.

And I? I am a man like every other man, just as that evening was like
every other evening.

. . . . .

I had been travelling since morning. Hurry, formalities, baggage, the
train, the whiff of different towns.

I fell into one of the armchairs. Everything became quieter and more
peaceful.

My coming from the country to stay in Paris for good marked an epoch in
my life. I had found a situation here in a bank. My days were to
change. It was because of this change that I got away from my usual
thoughts and turned to thoughts of myself.

I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen or
twenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insign