Club for lunch this sense of uneasiness, instead of being dissipated, was increased.  Dickinson was there, and Scherer, who had just got back from Europe; the talk fell on the Citizens Union, which Scherer belittled with an air of consequence and pompousness that struck me disagreeably, and with an eye newly critical I detected in him a certain disintegration, deterioration.  Having dismissed the reformers, he began to tell of his experiences abroad, referring in one way or another to the people of consequence who had entertained him.

“Hugh,” said Leonard Dickinson to me as we walked to the bank together, “Scherer will never be any good any more.  Too much prosperity.  And he’s begun to have his nails manicured.”

After I had left the bank president an uncanny fancy struck me that in Adolf Scherer I had before me a concrete example of the effect of my philosophy on the individual....

Nothing seemed to go right that spring, and yet nothing was absolutely wrong.  At times I became irritated, bewildered, out of tune, and unable to understand why.  The weather itself was uneasy, tepid, with long spells of hot wind and dust.  I no longer seemed to find refuge in my work.  I was unhappy at home.  After walking for many years in confidence and security along what appeared to be a certain path, I had suddenly come out into a vague country in which it was becoming more and more difficult to recognize landmarks.  I did not like to confess this; and yet I heard within me occasional whispers.  Could it be that I, Hugh Paret, who had always been so positive, had made a mess of my life?  There were moments when the pattern of it appeared to have fallen apart, resolved itself into pieces that refused to fit into each other.

Of course my relationship with Nancy had something to do with this....

One evening late in the spring, after dinner, Maude came into the library.

“Are you busy, Hugh?” she asked.

I put down my newspapers.

“Because,” she went on, as she took a chair near the table where I was writing, “I wanted to tell you that I have decided to go to Europe, and take the children.”

“To Europe!” I exclaimed.  The significance of the announcement failed at once to register in my brain, but I was aware of a shock.

“Yes.”

“When?” I asked.

“Right away.  The end of this month.”

“For the summer?”

“I haven’t decided how long I shall stay.”

I stared at her in bewilderment.  In contrast to the agitation I felt rising within me, she was extraordinarily calm, unbelievably so.

“But where do you intend to go in Europe?”

“I shall go to London for a month or so, and after that to some quiet place in France, probably at the sea, where the children can learn French and German.  After that, I have no plans.”

“But—­you talk as if you might stay indefinitely.”