o has stood
a friend in an emergency. But Camille knows that, for her, few flowers
are even annual, and Oakhurst is practical and a fatalist.

From that day, all his life, Grant Harlson kept away from close touch
with this ever-existing group who live from day to day because they
have been branded and do not care. Good friends he ever had among
them, but they never claimed him, though, on many occasions, the men
served him. They recognized the fact that he had never been more than
an adopted wanderer among them, and rather prided themselves upon him.
In later times he would occasionally exchange a word or two on that old
life with some one who had grown outwardly respectable, with some
one-time thug, later saloon-keeper and alderman and what may follow,
and would be reminded of what happened on the night when the mirrors
were all broken, and the Washington woman shot the man she was seeking,
or when "we did the Coulson gang;" but it had long grown to seem unreal
and dreamlike. He grew away from the memory, and there was no glamour
to him in what might attract some other men to evil-doing, because to
him there could be no novelty. He was a past-master in the ceremonials
of fallen, reckless human nature, and the ritual bored him. He
deserved no credit further than that. True, he was but young when he
learned the rites, but that he was not still a member of the order was
only because his ambition was dominant and his tastes had changed.
That his will was strong, that he had tastes to develop, was because of
the blood which filled his veins, and of nothing else. He had gone
with a current absolutely, though swimming and always keeping his head
above water until he swam ashore. Yet, as told in the beginning of
this chapter, he always said to me that he did not regret this
experience of abandonment. And he became a man seeking place and money.

He liked to visit his old home, and was faithful to his old crony, his
aging mother, still; and, for a time, after any of these sojourns among
the birds and squirrels and in the forest, he would be distrait and
preoccupied with something; but all this would wear off, and then would
come the press for place and pelf again. He was not entirely
unsuccessful, and finally he married, as a prospering young man
should--married a woman with money and presence for a hostess, and with
traits to make her potent. He lived with her for a season, and found
another, without his dreams an