Roger sat without moving, his heavy face impassive.  And so he remained for a long time.  Well, Laura was gone—­no mistake about that—­and this time she was gone for good.  She was going to live in Rome.  Try to stop her?  No.  What good would it do?  Wings of the Eagles, Rome reborn.  That was it, she had hit it, struck the keynote of this new age.  Rome reborn, all clean, old-fashioned Christian living swept away by millions of men at each others’ throats like so many wolves.  And at last quite openly to himself Roger admitted that he felt old.  Old and beaten, out of date.  Moments passed, and hours—­he took little note of time.  Nor did he see on the mantle the dark visage of “The Thinker” there, resting on the huge clinched fist and brooding down upon him.  Lower, imperceptibly, he sank into his leather chair.

Quiet had returned to his house.

CHAPTER XXXIV

But the quiet was dark to Roger now.  Each night he spent in his study alone, for instinctively he felt the need of being by himself for a while, of keeping away from his children—­out of whose lives he divined that other events would soon come forth to use up the last of the strength that was in him.

And Roger grew angry with the world.  Why couldn’t it let a man alone, an old man in a silent house alive for him with memories?  Repeatedly in such hours his mind would go groping backward into the years behind him.  What a long and winding road, half buried in the jungle, dim, almost impenetrable, made up of millions of small events, small worries, plans and dazzling dreams, with which his days had all been filled.  But the more he recalled the more certain he grew that he was right.  Life had never been like this:  the world had never come smashing into his house, his very family, with its dirty teeming tenements, its schools, its prisons, electric chairs, its feverish rush for money, its luxuries, its scandals.  These things had existed in the world, but remote and never real, mere things which he had read about.  War?  Did he not remember wars that had come and gone in Europe?  But they hadn’t come into his home like this, first making him poor when he needed money for Edith and her children, then plunging Deborah into a struggle which might very probably ruin her life, and now taking Laura and filling her mind with thoughts of pagan living.  Why was every man, woman and child, these days, bound up in the whole life of the world?  What would come of it all?  A new day out of this deafening night?  Maybe so.  But for him it would come too late.

“What have I left to live for?”