a great deal, he admitted; then, as if flinching before a threatened sacrilege, he looked away again, while he remembered with a quick recognition of the ludicrous, that among the articles for which Connie had not paid was a pair of pearl ear-rings.  The item had taken a prominence oddly out of keeping with its significance, and he found that it irritated him more than the thought of objects of a decidedly greater cost.  That any woman, that his wife in particular, should want a pair of ear-rings appeared to him little short of the barbaric.

But the incident was trifling, and a minute later it had faded entirely from his reflections.  As he sat there in his easy-chair in the lamp light his thoughts turned slowly backward, travelling over the tragic yet uneventful history of his life.  He remembered his childhood on a little Western farm, the commonplace poverty of his people, and his own burning, agonised ambition, which had sent him through college on a pittance, swept the highest honours from his graduation year, and wrecked at last what had been at his starting out a fairly promising physical constitution.  He recalled, too, the sleepless enthusiasm of his last term at Harvard, the terrible exhaustion which had made his final triumph barren, and the long illness which had brought him in the end, with shattered health, to the door of the great specialist in lung diseases.  At this day he could shut his eyes and summon back with distinctness the smallest detail of the interview.  He went over again his tedious wait in the outer office—­the scattered magazines upon the table, the utterly inartistic prints upon the wall, the ticking of the tall bronze clock on the mantel, and even the number of the page he had been reading in a periodical, for—­following a methodical habit—­he had unconsciously made a mental note of the figures when he laid the magazine aside to face the examination behind the folding doors.  With the patient attention to minutia which was a part of his literary instinct, his memory followed the great man across the ugly yellow squares in the carpet and fixed itself upon a row of small green bottles standing in a wooden rack upon the table.  Through the half hour of his visit, which brief as it was casually dismissed him to his death, those slender green phials seemed to his fancy to hold an absurd and grotesque prominence.  “In a climate like this I’d give you three years—­maybe a little longer—­yes, I think I may grant a little longer,” the great man had remarked, with what seemed to Adams a ridiculous assumption of yielding a concession.  “In a dryer air you might even be good, we may say, until thirty-five or forty.”  He shrugged his shoulders with a gesture intended to convey his sympathy but which succeeded only in expressing his personal importance, and Adams had walked out from the stuffy little ether-smelling office with a feeling curiously like that he had known as a boy when during a school game of football, he found himself suddenly thumped upon the heart.  On the doorstep he had stopped and laughed aloud, struck by the persistency with which the green bottles dominated his impressions.