I had never seen him in a more relaxing mood, a more approving one.  My mother sat down beside me....  Words seem useless to express the complicated nature of my suffering at that moment,—­my remorse, my sense of deception, of hypocrisy,—­yes, and my terror.  I tried to talk naturally, to answer my father’s questions about affairs at the store, while all the time my eyes rested upon the objects of the room, familiar since childhood.  Here were warmth, love, and safety.  Why could I not be content with them, thankful for them?  What was it in me that drove me from these sheltering walls out into the dark places?  I glanced at my father.  Had he ever known these wild, destroying desires?  Oh, if I only could have confided in him!  The very idea of it was preposterous.  Such placidity as theirs would never understand the nature of my temptations, and I pictured to myself their horror and despair at my revelation.  In imagination I beheld their figures receding while I drifted out to sea, alone.  Would the tide—­which was somehow within me—­carry me out and out, in spite of all I could do?

     “Give me that man
     That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
     In my heart’s core....”

I did not shirk my tasks at the store, although I never got over the feeling that a fine instrument was being employed where a coarser one would have done equally well.  There were moments when I was almost overcome by surges of self-commiseration and of impotent anger:  for instance, I was once driven out of a shop by an incensed German grocer whom I had asked to settle a long-standing account.  Yet the days passed, the daily grind absorbed my energies, and when I was not collecting, or tediously going over the stock in the dim recesses of the store, I was running errands in the wholesale district, treading the burning brick of the pavements, dodging heavy trucks and drays and perspiring clerks who flew about with memorandum pads in their hands, or awaiting the pleasure of bank tellers.  Save Harvey, the venerable porter, I was the last to leave the store in the evening, and I always came away with the taste on my palate of Breck and Company’s mail, it being my final duty to “lick” the whole of it and deposit it in the box at the corner.  The gum on the envelopes tasted of winter-green.

My Cousin Robert was somewhat astonished at my application.

“We’ll make a man of you yet, Hugh,” he said to me once, when I had performed a commission with unexpected despatch....

Business was his all-in-all, and he had an undisguised contempt for higher education.  To send a boy to college was, in his opinion, to run no inconsiderable risk of ruining him.  What did they amount to when they came home, strutting like peacocks, full of fads and fancies, and much too good to associate with decent, hard-working citizens?  Nevertheless when autumn came and my friends departed with eclat for the East, I was desperate indeed!  Even the contemplation