Such days and nights had fed an already inordinate craving.  He burned for the beautiful things just beyond his grasp, suffered for them amid his morning moralisings, dreamt of them at night.  His was never the disinterested love of the beautiful that certain lucky collectors retain through all the sordidness of the quest.  Had you observed John in the auction room you would have felt something concentratedly feline in his attitude and would hardly have been surprised had he pounced bodily upon a fine object as it passed near him down the aisle.  No other ghost of the auction rooms—­and strange enthusiasts they are, had an eye that gleamed with so ominous a fire.  There is peril in turning even a weak will into a narrow channel.  It may exert amazing pressures—­like the slender column of mere water that lifts a loaded car to, or with bad direction, through, the roof.

* * * * *

Whether we should call John Baxter’s courtship and marriage a digression or the culmination of his career as a collector might have remained doubtful were it not for the cross in Fourth Avenue.  When he found it, hardly a week before he met Miriam Trent, he naturally did not take it for a touchstone.  That it was in a manner such, may be inferred from the fact that the anxious morning before the wedding, he stopped at Novelli’s for a last look, a ceremony strangely parodying the bachelor supper of more ordinary bridegrooms.  After a lingering survey of its deep translucent enamels penned within crisply chiselled silver, like tiny lakes rimmed by ledges, he handed the cross back to the reverent Novelli.  It had never looked more desirable, he barely heard Novelli’s genial congratulation on the coming of the great day, as he wondered how so splendid a rarity had stayed in that little shop for two years.  On reflection the reason was simple.  The price, six hundred dollars, was a shade high for another dealer to pay, while the cross itself was so fine an object as merely to excite the distrust of Novelli’s average customers.  “Fools,” muttered John, “how little they know,” and hurried towards the florist’s.  As he made his way back towards an impressive frock-coat, his first, he found himself recalling with a certain satisfaction that even if this were not his wedding day, he really never could have hoped to buy the cross.

What Miriam Trent would have thought had she learned that her bridegroom waived all comparison between herself and the cross only because it was unattainable, one may hardly surmise.  But as a sensible person who already knew John’s foible and was accustomed to making allowances, she possibly would have been amused and just a bit relieved.  She was everything that he was not.  Where one passion absorbed him, she gave herself gladly to many interests and duties.  A second mother to her numerous small brothers and sisters, and to her amiable inefficient father as well, she had somehow managed school and college for