the dreaming eye. But in fact, there was no background of
gold, dull or otherwise; and when Peter reflected on the size of his
salary and the shifts to which poverty must needs resort--the shabby
clothes, the domestic sordidness, the devastating finger-marks of
weariness and anxiety upon even the fairest face--his courage failed
him, and he surrendered the profile to one who could give her a
Kentucky stock farm, a town house in New York and a box at the opera
there.

After that episode, he resigned his hope of romance. Fate was perverse
and offered him impossible combinations, and he had not the energy to
seek and seize for himself. So love, like the other big prizes of
life, eluded him, and at thirty-three he was a confirmed bachelor as
well as a professional idler. He still pursued the graceful, aimless
flirtations that are the small change of intercourse at dances and
dinners--just as he still read Theocritus--but neither his heart nor
his mind engaged in any more serious endeavor.

And yet, every now and then, he felt a faint desire for something more,
for something that should not be a pastime, nor a mere bread-and-butter
chore--something that would demand and exhaust the best of him and give
him in return the pride of work worth the doing and doing well.

This afternoon the desire was more than usually persistent, and it had
held him at his desk long after school hours were over, fingering his
pen and ink bottle, glancing through the weekly essays which had that
day been handed in for criticism, and turning the leaves of a history
of English literature with which he had vainly striven to awake
enthusiasm in the minds of his class.

The school-room was a pleasant place, as school-rooms go. There were
potted plants on the window sills and a few good engravings on the
walls, and the afternoon sunshine was streaming gaily in. But to Peter
the room was the disillusioning scene of unwilling labors--both on the
part of his pupils and himself--and its chalky atmosphere was heavy and
depressing.

"What's the use of pretending that _this_ is a 'life-work'--a 'noble
profession'?" he muttered, after his casual examination of a
particularly discouraging essay. "They don't _want_ to learn. They
only want to get through and away. After Sheila graduates, I'll he
without a single responsive pupil. For I won't get another like
her--not in years, and probably never. Why don't I chuck it all? Why
_don't_ I go away?