One day the senior partner called Harlson in, and a long conference was held.  The younger man was offered a partnership on condition that he would make a specialty of certain branches of the firm’s varied practice; but the offer had its disadvantages.  It was not in the line political at all, but in one with vexatious business demands and requisites; yet it was accepted in a moment.  And within the next week all the wicked, nervous night-life was abandoned, all the friendships formed there put upon probation, all the soiled sentiment made a thing to be ended surely and forgotten, if possible.

There were some wrenches to it all.  Camille learns to love sometimes, and Oakhurst, the gambler, does not want to part with one who has stood a friend in an emergency.  But Camille knows that, for her, few flowers are even annual, and Oakhurst is practical and a fatalist.

From that day, all his life, Grant Harlson kept away from close touch with this ever-existing group who live from day to day because they have been branded and do not care.  Good friends he ever had among them, but they never claimed him, though, on many occasions, the men served him.  They recognized the fact that he had never been more than an adopted wanderer among them, and rather prided themselves upon him.  In later times he would occasionally exchange a word or two on that old life with some one who had grown outwardly respectable, with some one-time thug, later saloon-keeper and alderman and what may follow, and would be reminded of what happened on the night when the mirrors were all broken, and the Washington woman shot the man she was seeking, or when “we did the Coulson gang;” but it had long grown to seem unreal and dreamlike.  He grew away from the memory, and there was no glamour to him in what might attract some other men to evil-doing, because to him there could be no novelty.  He was a past-master in the ceremonials of fallen, reckless human nature, and the ritual bored him.  He deserved no credit further than that.  True, he was but young when he learned the rites, but that he was not still a member of the order was only because his ambition was dominant and his tastes had changed.  That his will was strong, that he had tastes to develop, was because of the blood which filled his veins, and of nothing else.  He had gone with a current absolutely, though swimming and always keeping his head above water until he swam ashore.  Yet, as told in the beginning of this chapter, he always said to me that he did not regret this experience of abandonment.  And he became a man seeking place and money.

He liked to visit his old home, and was faithful to his old crony, his aging mother, still; and, for a time, after any of these sojourns among the birds and squirrels and in the forest, he would be distrait and preoccupied with something; but all this would wear off, and then would come the press for place and pelf again.  He was not entirely unsuccessful, and finally he married, as a prospering young man should—­married a woman with money and presence for a hostess, and with traits to make her potent.  He lived with her for a season, and found another, without his dreams and sympathies and understandings, but with a will and a way.