For the last ten years England had been merely a place to think of as home.  He had been in India, and South America, and Canada—­up on the Yukon.  He would have stayed there, but somebody suggested that he might be a remittance man.  Ye gods! a remittance man with ten thousand pounds a year!  And who could have had much more, for Mark Griffin was a master with his pen.  His imagination glowed, and his travels had fanned it into flame.  Every day he wrote, but burned the product next morning.  What was the use?  He had plenty to live on.  Why write another man out of a job?  And who could be a writer with an income of ten thousand pounds a year?  But, just the same, it added to Mark Griffin’s self-hatred to think that it was the income that made him useless.  Yet he had only one real failure checked against him—­the one at Oxford.  But he knew—­and he did not deceive himself—­why there had been no others.  He had never tried.

But there was one thing in Mark’s favor, too.  In spite of his wandering, in spite of the men and women of all kinds he had met, he was clean.  There was a something in the memory of his mother—­and in the memory, too, of that puppy love of his—­that had made him a fighter against himself.

“The great courage that is worth while before God,” his mother used to say, “is the courage to run away from the temptation to be unclean.  It is the only time you have the right to be a coward.  That sort of cowardice is true courage.”

Besides her sweet face, that advice was the great shining memory he had of his mother, and when he began to wander and meet temptations, he found himself treasuring it as his best and dearest memory of her.  True, he had missed her religion—­had lost what little he had had of it—­but he had kept her talisman to a clean life.

His lack of religion worried him, though he had really never known much about his family’s form of it.  For that his mother’s death, early boarding school, and his father’s worse than indifference, were responsible.  But as he grew older he felt vaguely that he had missed something the quality of which he had but tasted through the one admonition of his mother that he had treasured.  His nature was full of reverence.  His soul burned to respond to the call of faith, but something rebelled.  He had read everything, and was humble enough to acknowledge that he knew little.  He had given up the struggle to believe.  Nothing seemed satisfactory.  It worried him to think that he had reached such a conclusion, but he was consoled by the thought that many men had been of his way of thinking.  He hoped this would prove excuse enough, but found it was not excuse enough for him.  Here he was, rich, noble, with the English scales of caste off his eyes, doing nothing, indolent, loving only a memory, indifferent but still seeing a saving something of his mother and his child love in every woman to whom he spoke.