Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/353

 grace. His strong, well-built body was graceful even when laboring with a shovel; and Alice thought of a time in their freshman year, when he supported himself by labor, and she was going to college in a snowstorm and she had come upon him, in flannel shirt and with coat off, clearing a walk of the heavy snow with that same strong, vigorous, graceful swing of his body.

She watched him as long as she dared; then she drove off before he saw her.

At the end of the month, he returned to selling cars with so much energy that Snelgrove allowed that maybe the camp might help business after all. Irving thought that David's better physcialphysical [sic] condition accounted for his increased activity; but the actual impetus was his determination to pay off his debt at the earliest possible moment and make himself free.

He returned to his room in the city but he liked it even less than before.

"I mean to move," he announced to Alice one Sunday afternoon in September when she and he were walking west from her home.

"Where to?" she asked. "Back to a hotel where you'll be more with people?"

"No; I'm through with hotels. I'm crazy, I suppose, but since I've been shoveling and working with my back again, I'd like to keep on doing that sort of work. And I certainly have a hankering for a house and to take care of things again. When I get into that room of mine and all I have to do, before I go to bed, is turn out the light, I feel I've forgotten half a dozen things."