Page:The Silver Poppy.djvu/21

 gone hungry, and been unhappy, and waited, some day I might have written my great book!"

"Then why not go back, and wait, and be unhappy, and hungry, even, and write it?"

"It's too late; I can't. And that's the worst of of it all. You see that bent, tired looking old man sitting by the woman in gray? Well, he's the editor of 'The Republic.' For twenty years now he's been talking about the little peach-farm he's going to buy somewhere back in the New Jersey hills. He's never it, poor old done fellow! And he'll never do it. That's only his fata morgana, for he's foredoomed to in harness. He couldn't break away from this life if he wanted to; he'd get homesick for the glare and noise and rush and rattle of it in a week, and perish of loneliness. But still he goes grinding away, dreaming about his peach-farm among the hills, and putting it continually off for one year more, and then still one year more. But there—you're beginning to think I'm a regular Jeremiah wailing in the desert of American mediocrity, so I'm going to leave you here alone to think it all over."

From the shadowy quietness of window-seat Hartley looked out on the shifting, bewildering scene before him, a panorama of movement and color and energy that seemed to lose none of its unrest as midnight approached and waned. The young Oxonian felt that it was all a more or less disturbing glimpse of a new world that was opening up before him. He seemed able to catch at no order or meaning in the