Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/85

 But she settled down to her bouillon and grazed slowly on her crackers, crunching them one by one and brushing the crumbs from her bosom to her lap.

"Even Sargent's late things," Grover resumed, "look as though they'd been done by heart—"

"Have you read The Little French Girl?" The old woman had seen him glance up from his paper. She had extracted the novel from a shawl and was feeling around for her spectacles. Grover had read it, but not even he, polite as he was, could be expected to discuss Anne Sedgwick with this crumby old bore, so he kept his eyes on his letter.

"Creation," he wrote, "is the only solution I can see to my problems. In Aldergrove the future seemed to recede rather than advance. Everything you do there is merely a prolongation of the past: a poor old past that's like the watch you got for your fifteenth birthday,—nice, but it won't go any more. You just can't conceive of anything in Aldergrove ever being essentially different. As you grow up it doesn't seem so far from Boston; you can even commute, like Mr. Marple and Mr. Sipe; the fields turn into real estate, and people come for the summer. But that's not different; it's only more, and a wrong kind of more. What I'm trying to say is that in Aldergrove your only prospect is to become more completely what you used to be,—and God knows I'm enough of that already. I want to be something else!

"I went home from Harvard on flat tires. The last