In the mists of the infinite, events poise invisible, awaiting their
opportunity to incarnate themselves. They fasten, each after his kind,
on these human lives of ours, as germs find the culture soil they love;
so it follows that to the commonplace comes a life of dull routine,
foolish happenings seek out the sentimentalist, sordid events seek the
sordid and on the mystic dawns the mysterious. Calamities wait there,
too, until Fate points out a weak spot in character on which they may
pounce relentless with the temptation that pierces it. As there are
certain things that would scarcely dare to happen to certain people, so
other greater events would hardly condescend to those whom they
recognize as being their own inferiors.
Once in a while, particularly when a man is young or beginning a new
phase of life, there come times when the things that are to be seem
almost tangible. They press until he feels them crowd, while he waits
with tense expectation for them to become visible to the crude eye of
outer experience.
Perhaps it was due to a certain occultism in the atmosphere that Ellery
Norris felt this pressure of the future on the afternoon of Mr. Early's
reception to Ram Juna. Norris was a new young man in a new young city,
and he had come West to live. However short and futile life may look to
the old, it appears a big and long thing to twenty-three. Here in St.
Etienne he was to work and work hard; among these people, now all
strangers, he was to find the friends of his lifetime; here were to come
all the experiences of struggle, failure, success, perhaps of love.
He turned and glanced with a little sense of relief at Richard Percival
seated beside him. Dick was the one stanch thing out of his past; Dick
he had known and loved at college; Dick was even now showing himself a
friend; and all these other folk were but the ghosts of things to come.
Then he laughed lightly at himself for his own fantasy, and returned to
the survey of his surroundings.
The vast new hall in which they sat, a hall young in years but old
Gothic in pretense, might have suggested a possessor of the stately and
knightly type rather than a little cockatoo like Mr. Early; but man has
this advantage over the snail, that, whereas, the snail is obliged to
construct a home around its slimy little body, man may build his
habitation to match his imagination and ambition. In the West, moreover,
it is the custom to leave the low-vaulted past and build more stately
mansions as fast as the increasing purse will permit.