When, late in August, he and Eleanor went to Green Hill for a few days vacation, the effect of this repression was marked.  There were wrinkles on his forehead under the thatch of his blond hair; his blue eyes were dulled, and he was taciturn to the point of rudeness—­except to Eleanor.  He was very polite to Eleanor.  He never, now, amused himself by imagining how he could disappear if he had the luck to be in a theater fire.  He knew that because he had enslaved himself to a lie, he had lost the right even to dream freedom.  So there were no more “fool thoughts” as to how a man might “kick over the traces.”  There was nothing for him to do, now (he said), but “play the game.”  The Houghtons were uneasily aware of a difference in him; and Edith, fifteen now, felt that he had changed, and had fits of shyness with him.  “He’s like he was that night on the river,” she told herself, “when he gave the lady his coat.”  She sighed when she said this, and it occurred to her that she would be a missionary.  “I won’t get married,” she thought; “I’ll go and nurse lepers.  He’s exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh.”

But of course she had moments of forgetting the lepers—­moments when she came down to the level of people like Johnny Bennett.  When this happened, she thought that, instead of going to the South Seas, she would become a tennis star and figure in international tournaments; even Johnny admitted that she served well—­for a girl.  One day she confessed this ambition to Maurice, but he immediately beat her so badly that she became her old childlike, grumpy self, and said Johnny was nicer for singles; which enabled Maurice to turn her loose on John and go off alone to climb the mountain.  He had a dreary fancy for looking at the camp, and living over again those days when he was still young—­and a fool, of course; but not so great a fool as now, with Lily living in a little flat in Mercer.  Batty’s lease had expired, and she had moved into a cheaper, but still ornate, apartment house on the other side of the river.  Well!  Lily had floated into his life as meaninglessly as a mote floats into a streak of light, and then floated out again.  He hadn’t seen her since—­since that time in May.

"Ass—­ass!" he said to himself.  “If Eleanor knew,” he thought, “there’d be a bust-up in two minutes.”  He even smiled grimly to think of that evening of the eclipse when, shaken by the awful beauty of eternal order, he had, for just one high moment, dreamed that he, too, could attain the orderliness of Truth—­and tell Eleanor.  “Idiot!” he said, contemptuously.  Probably Maurice touched his lowest level when he said that; for to be ashamed of an aspiration, to be contemptuous of emotion, is to sin against the Holy Ghost.