When Anthony came back from Boston, he revolted, too.  He had not been a prodigal; indeed, during his second year in the East, he had in one way or another, earned his own living and he had learned even beyond his father’s hopes to tune pianos.  But he did it at an incredibly small expense in time and energy.  What his heart went into during those two years was the study of musical theory and composition, and, thanks to a special aptitude which rose to the pitch of genius, he managed to make the comparatively meager training he could get in so short a time, suffice to give him the technical equipment he needed.

He came home armed, too, with a discovery.  The discovery that a man not enslaved by a possessive sense, a man whose self-respect is not dependent upon the number of things he owns, a man able therefore to thumb his nose at all the maxims of success, occupies really a very strong position.

He didn’t like the factory, though he gave it what he considered a fair trial.  He didn’t like the way they tuned pianos in a factory.  The dead level of mechanical perfection which they insisted upon was a stupid affront to his ear.  And, of course, the strict regimentation of life at home, the, once more, dead level of the plateau upon which life was supposed to be lived, was distasteful to one with a streak of the nomad and the adventurer in him.

Thanks to his discovery he was able to construct an alternative to a life like that.  A skillful piano tuner could earn what money he needed anywhere and could earn enough in a diligent week to set him free, his simple wants provided for, for the rest of the month.

But even a wanderer needs a base, a point of departure for his wanderings, and his father’s house could not be made to serve that purpose, so Anthony domiciled himself, after a long quest, in the half story above a little grocery just off North LaSalle Street and not far from the river.

It happened when Anthony had been living there a year or more that the grocer, with whom he was on the friendliest of terms, got, temporarily, into straits at precisely the time that Anthony had three hundred dollars.  He had won a prize of that amount offered by a society for the encouragement of literature for the minor orchestral instruments, with a concerto for the French horn.  The grocer offered his note for it, but Anthony thought of something better.  He bought his room.  It was to be his to live in, rent free, for as long as time endured.

He took a childlike pleasure in this lair of his.  It accumulated his miscellaneous treasures like a small boy’s pocket.  He made a mystery of it.  He never gave it as his address.  Not even his family knew where it was, nor, more than vaguely, of its existence.  The address he had given Paula was the one he gave every one else, his father’s house out on the northwest side, just off Fullerton Avenue.  This room, in a sense seldom attained, was his own.  When he came back from France, the day Lucile saw him sitting on the bench in the park, he found it exactly—­save for a heavy coating of dust—­as he had left it, in 1917, when he went down to Camp Grant.