Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/42

 that were gaining on him. Running down the steps into the golden green light of the street, stumbling over the humpy brick pavement on which a net of shadows was cast by the elms, he had a longing to hold tight to the present, and to include in it some nice bits of the past. For whatever the future might have to commend it, it would be at the expense of so much that he knew to be good,—it would be like selling keepsakes for mere money. What a pity, for instance, to exchange the Eric who had copied his Latin exercises for an Eric who was taking up golf and, apparently, Rhoda.

As he turned into Massachusetts Avenue Max's strange music clanged in his ears. For all his madness Max could wring more anguish out of ten bars of a hackneyed etude than he, Grover Thanet, could ever hope to wring out of ten whole opuses; and that was a source of refined misery to him. Art made way for the Bruffs; society made way for the Peperells; what under the sun ever made way for the Thanets? Rhoda had brutally put her finger on it when she said the Thanets weren't able to buck the tide. He smiled suddenly at the thought that if Rhoda had said opuses for opera he would have rebuked her, hypocrite and tyrant that he was, too, like everybody else!

A taxicab strayed his way and without giving his conscience time to protest he got in. For the moment his conscience was twitting him about the cavalier