Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/90

 had been accustomed to accepting, unquestioningly, the arrangements others had made for him. He remembered how he had been brought up like a girl, with long curls which had not been clipped until he was nearly seven years old. He recalled, with shame, the day on which he had been permitted to discard his kilts for a boy's proper apparel, and how at the time, he had been ashamed, rather, to make the change. He thought of his college days, one long struggle at hopeless compromise. He had not been a particularly good student, and the external activities of his fellow-students had proved utterly alien to his taste. How many times he had walked alone across the campus! How many nights he had remained alone in his room! His vacations were a repetition of his childhood: Aunt Sadi, dear Aunt Sadi, he thought today, Persia Blaine, Miss Perkins; riding, swimming, reading, the quiet, easy security of farm life, safe but unrevealing. . . . That extraordinary interview with his father: whatever happened he could never forget that. Then Alice Blake, who reminded him of Persia Blaine and Aunt Sadi, and who was young and beautiful besides, had passed his way, had been swept from his vision, and nothing remained but this new life, this incomprehensible and silly life, compounded of cocktails and chatter and music, which in its dissonances sounded almost obscene to him. In spite of Campaspe, he felt that he would never be able to cope with it. Why didn't he break