Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/174

 held little savor for him. Moments of satisfaction such as that which had overtaken him as he sat talking to Sabine were growing more and more rare. . . moments when he would stop and think, "Here am I, Michael O'Hara, a nobody . . . son of a laborer and a housemaid, settled in the midst of such a world as Durham, talking to such a woman as Mrs. Cane Callendar."

No, the savor was beginning to fail, to go out of the struggle. He was beginning to be bored, and as he grew bored he grew also restless and unhappy.

Born in the Roman Catholic church, he was really neither a very religious nor a very superstitious man. He was skeptic enough not to believe all the faiths the church sought to impose upon him, yet he was not skeptic enough to find peace of mind in an artificial will to believe. For so long a time he had relied wholly upon himself that the idea of leaning for support, even in lonely, restless moments, upon a God or a church, never even occurred to him. He remained outwardly a Roman Catholic because by denying the faith he would have incurred the enmity of the church and many thousands of devout Irish and Italians. The problem simply did not concern him deeply one way or the other.

And so he had come, guided for the moment by no very strong passion, into the doldrums of confusion and boredom. Even his fellow-politicians in Boston saw the change in him and complained that he displayed no very great interest in the campaign to send him to Congress. He behaved at times as if it made not the slightest difference to him whether he was elected to Congress or not. . . he, this Michael O'Hara who was so valuable to his party, so engaging and shrewd, who could win for it almost anything he chose.

And though he took care that no one should divine it, this strange state of mind troubled him more deeply than any of his friends. He was assailed by the certainty that there