He sat beside her now, strangely pale and disturbed.  The opera, she was sorry to note, had not interested him as she had expected it would.  He had, oddly enough, been reluctant to accompany her, and, as she was accustomed to his quick devotion, this distressed her not a little.  Was he growing tired of her?  Was he ashamed to be seen at the opera with a quiet woman in widow’s dress, a touch shabby?  Was her much-tired heart to have a last cruel blow dealt it?  Accustomed to rather somber pathways of thought, she could not escape this one; yet she loyally endeavored to turn from it, and from time to time she stole a look at the stern, pale face beside her to discover, if she could, what had robbed him of his good cheer.

For he had been a happy boy.  His high spirits had constituted a large part of his attraction for her.  When he had come to her orphaned, it had been with warm gratitude in his heart, and with the expectation of being loved.  As he grew older, that policy of life had become accentuated.  He was expectant in all that he did.  His temperamental friendliness had carried him through college, winning for him a warm group of friends and the genuine regard of his professors.  It was helping him to make his way in the place he had chosen for his field of action.  He had not gone into the more fashionable part of town, but far over on the West Side, where the slovenliness of the central part of the city shambles into a community of parks and boulevards, crude among their young trees surrounded by neat, self-respecting apartment houses.  Such communities are to be found in all American cities; communities which set little store by fashion, which prize education (always providing it does not prove exotic and breed genius or any form of disturbing beauty), live within their incomes and cultivate the manifest virtues.  The environment suited George Fitzgerald.  He had an honest soul without a bohemian impulse in him.  He recognized himself as being middle-class, and he was proud and glad of it.  He liked to be among people who kept their feet on the earth—­people whose yea was yea and whose nay was nay.  What was Celtic in him could do no more for him than lend a touch of almost flaring optimism to the Puritan integrity of his character.

Sundays, as a matter of habit, and occasionally on other days, he was his aunt’s guest at the Caravansary.  The intellectual cooeperatives there liked him, as indeed everybody did, everywhere.  Invariably Mrs. Dennison was told after his departure that she was a fortunate woman to have such an adopted son.  Yet Fitzgerald knew very well that he was unable to be completely himself among his aunt’s patrons.  Their conversation was too glancing; they too often said what they did not mean, for mere conversation’s sake; they played with ideas, tossing them about like juggler’s balls; and they attached importance to matters which seemed to him of little account.