Norris, as he left Percival's house, had a glimpse of Lena coming down
the hall, wonderful in her shimmering evening gown, brave in jewels. She
dazzled him, though he despised his eyes for admiring her and told
himself that she was tinsel.
He bowed in response to her curt nod, well aware that she thought him
too unimportant to merit her courtesy, while she resented her husband's
inexplicable regard for him. He went out into a cold winter drizzle and
turned his face toward home and Madeline, those new and thrilling
possessions. For the moment, however, there was no exhilaration in his
heart, rather a depressed questioning whether, after all, everything
beautiful was a sham. Was the daily grind a mechanical millwheel? Dick
and Dick's marriage, were they but samples of the way life deals with
hope? A pang stabbed through him as his own marriage rose and stood
beside Dick's in his mind. It meant so much to him; yet only a few
months before his friend had been bubbling with an exultation more
open-voiced than his own.
There are not only great Sloughs of Despond waiting here and there for
the pilgrim, but there are in almost every day little gutters of despond
that must be jumped if one does not wish cold and soiled feet; so here
his healthy mind cried out against morbid thoughts and he reviled
himself for companioning the thing he held sacred with the thing he had
always felt foredoomed to failure. He told himself that middle-age was
not a dead level of hopes grown gray and withered, but rather a
heightening of the contrasts between success and failure. A word of Mr.
Elton's spoken long ago, flashed back to him: "Don't build your attics
before you've finished your cellars." That, after all, was a test. If
one could but get a good solid foundation under hope, one might trust it
to lift its pinnacle as far toward Heaven as the ethereal upper air.
Alas for Dick!
Then, though he still loved his one-time hero, Ellery put Dick from his
mind. His feet quickened and his heart began to beat joyously again. He
ran up his steps, delighting in the commonplace performance of putting a
latch-key into a lock. The cold and drizzle were shut outside, and
Madeline waited in the warmth and light of the hall to insist on helping
him off with his overcoat, a task so absurdly difficult that when it was
finished they laughed and kissed each other in mutual delight at their
own foolishness.
Then Madeline took his hand and drew him into the living-room, where the
light was low and shaded, but blazing logs painted even far-shadowed
corners with warmth, and pranked the girl's white dress into glowing
pink, while the fire hummed and crackled its own triumph: "I consumed the deep green forest with all its songs,
And all the songs of the forest now sing aloud in me."