Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/51



WEN STORROW, one week later, was a not altogether happy young man. His misery, in fact, was a two- fold one. He found himself not only unhappy in his surroundings but even more un- happy in his own mind. The memories which he brought into that new environment were anything but tranquilliz- ing.

It had been a mistake, he told himself, to accept Au- gusta Kirkner's offer and establish his studio under her roof. He had come to the wrong place, and in doing so he had come in the wrong way and at the wrong time. The change, both the inner and the outer one, had been too abrupt. It had proved as cataclysmically disturbing as an earthquake, involving too sharp a rupture of all the filaments of habit and association. It had been wrench enough to be deprived, at a stroke, of the rough freedom of his woodsman's life. But the loss of that primordial freedom of the body had been followed by an episode and in his own mind Storrow still insisted that it was merely an episode which gave every promise of resulting in a captivity of the soul.

For Storrow looked back on his last night at The Alwyn Arms as a sort of dream, some of it blurred in outline, some of it photographic in vividness. He was neither ascetic by instinct nor straight-laced in his out- look on the world. But this, his first adventure along that water-way of passion which twines now silver and now sullen across the huddled destinies of men, had come upon him too abruptly for consideration. It had seemed to leap upon his shoulders like a wild-cat from a tree- 41