ng stronger every hour),
they will meet not a brother's hand but a glutton's--the hard, dead hand
of a hard, dead soul. Then will the vicious poor and the vicious
well-to-do, each crippled by his own vices, the blind leading the blind,
fall to in a merciless conflict, mad and meaningless, born of a sad,
unnecessary hate that shall terrorize the earth, unless God sends us
another miracle of love like Christ or some vast chastening scourge of
war, to turn aside the fateful blow."

CHAPTER XIII

IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE INTERIOR OF A DESERTED HOUSE

An empty, lonely house was that on Quality Hill in Elm Street after the
daughter's marriage. It was not that the Doctor and Mrs. Nesbit did not
see their daughter often; but whether she came every day or twice a week
or every week, always she came as a visitor. No one may have two homes.
And the daughter of the house of Nesbit had her own home;--a home
wherein she was striving to bind her husband to a domesticity which in
itself did not interest him. But with her added charm to it, she
believed that she could lure him into an acceptance of her ideal of
marriage. So with all her powers she fell to her task. Consciously or
unconsciously, directly or by indirection, but always with the joy of
adventure in her heart, whether with books or with music or with
comradeship, she was bending herself to the business of wifehood, so
that her own home filled her life and the Nesbit home was lonely; so
lonely was it that by way of solace and diversion, Mrs. Nesbit had all
the woodwork downstairs "done over" in quarter-sawed oak with elaborate
carvings. Ferocious gargoyles, highly excited dolphins, improper,
pot-bellied little cupids, and mermaids without a shred of character,
seemed about to pounce out from banister, alcove, bookcase, cozy corner
and china closet.

George Brotherton pretended to find resemblances in the effigies to
people about Harvey, and to the town's echoing delight he began to name
the figures after their friends, and always saluted the figures
intimately, as Maggie, or Henry, or the Captain, or John Kollander, or
Lady Herdicker. But through the wooden menagerie in the big house the
Doctor whistled and hummed and smoked and chirruped more or less
drearily. To him the Japanese screens, the huge blue vases, the
ponderous high-backed chairs crawly with meaningless carvings, the
mantels full of jars and pots and statuettes, brought no comfort. He was
forever putt