be scientists, like Sir Isaac Newton in the engraving on the wall of his father's study. Sir Isaac was the only scientist he knew by sight.

In the summers Mr. Banks gave him a job in his leather store, where the creaking of saddles and the smell of well-oiled leather reminded him of hours spent in barns while his father sat by a bedside in the adjoining house. The smell in the store, however, was raw, unlike the smell of leather which has been handled in the task of living. In the evenings he read in his room at the top of the house.

The third year he spent in the city his father died. John came home, one gray day in January, for the service. A dozen of the doctor's friends, who still remained, and a fringe of others, who were idle at that season, gathered in the small parlor. Their faces were red and drawn with the wind through which they had driven. No one talked. John noticed for the first time that the brown carpet was worn through between the door and the centre of the room, where a table had stood during his boyhood. In his father's study he sat silently at the tall desk, where empty pill-bottles rattled in the drawers, and papers protruded from the upright row of cubby-holes in the rear, like a bird ruffling its breast. At this desk his father had sat each day for thirty years. John shivered; the chill of the room was creeping up his spine, and Sir Isaac Newton's regard from the wall was more steely than ever. The young man knew that the silence of the people in the parlor was less from grief than from the shrivelling cold.

After that John left school. The house and furniture and the small library the doctor left barely repaid the money he had borrowed the last years of his life. The surplus which remained, after the expenses of the death had been met, was put in the bank to help pay John's way through the agricultural college. By day he worked in the leather store. In the evenings he sat alone in his room, under the gas-jet, which hummed like a mosquito.

It was the spring after his father's death that he met Marian, whose father was one of Mr. Banks's friends. The tall, straight girl, with shining hair, came sometimes with her parents to dinner. She was not gawky, like the girls he had known in

school, and her voice was clear. Looking at her across the table he found the sureness of her movements intolerably beautiful, like the upward thrust of wheat in a field. At the same time he resented her. She was only his age, but she met life with a poise which humiliated him. Her opinions were flung off with arrogance. In him a slow boiling of the emotions preceded each idea. A favorite subject of controversy between them, after they had known each other a couple of months, became his desire to go back to the country.

"Why do you read so much," she demanded of him once, "if you are only going to plant beans all your life?" She had been trying to persuade him to learn to dance and was annoyed by his indifference.

"I am not going to plant beans," he retorted. "I'm going to raise apples."

"What's the difference? Why don't you do something that takes brains, like Albert?" Her brother Albert was studying to become an engineer.

"I'm going to college," persisted John. "Do you have to go to college to learn how to grow apples?" she asked. "Apples grow any way. You just pick them up and put them in baskets. But to build a bridge you have to study for years."

"They don't just grow," John continued. "Apparently you never heard of cion grafting, did you? Or bud grafting?" He raged within himself, knowing that this was not the real issue of the conversation, but unable to tell what was.

Marian was smoothing out a lemoncolored sash at her waist.

"Do you like this dress?" she asked. It was one her mother had made for her, which dropped softly against her, emphasizing the smoothness of her movements. About the throat it curled in frosty lace.

"Obviously you never did," he continued. "You probably think that if you plant the seed of an Alexander apple, you get an Alexander tree."

"I never heard of an Alexander apple," she answered, "but I know what it means to build a bridge. I should think you'd have some ambition."

John writhed.

"I've as much as Albert," he muttered. His tone startled her. Why did he insist on taking the matter emotionally?

"You're a nice boy," she said unexpectedly. "Tell me the truth, do you think this dress looks too plain?"

John looked into her candid blue eyes and thought her, next to the trunk of an apple-tree, the most moving thing in the world. It hurt him to look at her.

"With that frilly stuff around your neck," he said chokingly, "you look like a girl of ten."

Marian slapped him across the face, and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

For a moment they faced each other, the contact of her hand on his cheek burning them both. They grew suddenly older and ashamed of their childishness. Their hands touched and retreated. "Did I hurt you?" she asked. "I'm sorry."

"It's my fault," he said in a small voice. "What I said wasn't true."

"I don't look like a little girl of ten?" "No."

"Do you like me?”

There was a pause.

"Let's go for a walk," he suggested. "It's hot in here."

As they went down the steps of the front porch, the warmth of a summer evening fell on their faces, heavy with the scent of honeysuckle, which grew on the railing. Even the city, John thought, was beautiful, since it lay in the valley of the Hudson and was inhabited by Marian.

They walked together frequently that summer, though they quarrelled in August when she refused to go with him any more until he had polished his shoes.

"You look like a tramp," she declared. "What will everybody say?"

John resentfully polished his shoes. He hated her for caring what other people would say, and he loved her for caring at all, since he was the object of her concern. The street where they walked most often was lined on each side with a row of soft maples. The thick foliage spread across the street until it nearly met above the cobblestones. The houses were set back from the sidewalk, protected by

short lawns, and on one of these usually lay a Boston bull, sniffing the evening. John always spoke to the dog when they passed, to the embarrassment of Marian. The gleam of the street lamps threw a blackish lustre on the leaves, as though they had been cut from metal and hung in place. Under this canopy they walked frequently without talking, or John listened while Marian recounted the details of dances. He had promised to learn to dance the following winter. At intervals they emerged from the shadow to cross a patch of light under the street lamp, and plunge into the tunnel of the next block. At such times her face shone, and her perfect features stirred an ache in his spirit. When this feeling possessed him, he talked to her of his childhood, describing the dusty roads and twisted apple-trees where he had played.

Marian listened with a slight repulsion to the details of this meagre life on farms. John could not guess that it sounded sordid to her and that, as she was growing more tender toward him, she was glad for his sake that he had left it.

"I would never be a farmer's wife," she declared once.

"Why not?" asked John.

"It's so grubby. When I marry, I'm going to find a husband who will be somebody in the world."

That autumn, when the leaves crackled under their feet and the trees stood naked, the sight of the sere earth brought a contraction in John's breast, as it did each year. But this time his emotion was inseparable from the thought of Marian, and one evening as they walked, he asked her to marry him.

III

JOHN closed the frosted-glass door in the partition which walled off his office from the larger room where a dozen typewriters clicked. On the outside of his door was printed "Sales Manager." Macfarlane, in charge of the complaint department, who occupied the adjoining office, was already at work on his morning's mail. His voice, in the slightly strained pitch at which one talks into a dictaphone, came over the top of the flimsy partition. This partition stopped two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, and

John had often looked up from his desk to the rim of it, wishing he could hypnotize it to grow suddenly taller and press its streaky buff boards against the whitewashed ceiling. Mac's voice paused, there was a snap as he put a new cylinder on his machine, and the dictation began again. The building was permeated by a musty odor of leather, for the offices adjoined the factory. This was not the saddle and harness store in which John had gone to work twenty years before. Five years after that first summer, Mr. Banks had sold the store and become a partner in an already established business, supplying leather goods to the industries. Collins, Bolton & Banks owned their own tanneries down the river; their hides were bought chiefly in Alsace and Savoy, or at the monthly auctions in Paris, by their agent. In their factory they turned out leather belting, gaskets, and other leather articles used in factories and for railroad equipment.

Marklin sat down and pushed the buzzer on his desk. A machine on the other side of the partition was silenced, and Miss Platt opened the door.

"Good morning, sir," she said. Miss Platt's voice was muted, and under her high, narrow forehead, of a dull white like parchment, her mouth and chin were both so small that they seemed compressed. John had often wondered what bitterness had cauterized her spirit so early and left her rigid within.

"Good morning," he said. "Is Mr. Hunter in the office?"

"He went to Schenectady yesterday to see a belt they're installing in a new factory. He said he might go on to Fonda, if he got word that Nevinson Brothers had received their last order. He was going to telephone from Schenectady."

"If he comes in to-day, will you tell him I'd like to see him? It's about that billiard-ball concern I wrote to yesterday." When the door closed behind her, John wondered if she had been in the room, and if the voice he had heard coming from his lips had been his own. He raked the morning's mail toward him like a pile of dead leaves. As he did so, his eye fell on the photograph standing in a silver frame across the blotter. It was a picture of Marian sitting in a carved, highbacked Florentine chair, with Dorothy at

her side, taken when their daughter was seven years old. Marian was wearing a low gown of black velvet, from which her shoulders emerged like mellowed ivory. Her head was carried high, and the thick blond hair reflected a tawny light over her features. Marian had always loved dignity. She held the centre of the picture as surely as a knife thrust in wood. By her side Dorothy's slim dark head was a flash of something foreign, subordinate to her mother, yet independent. Marian did not gaze down at the child with the consciously maternal expression of many women being photographed with their children; her eyes swept the space in front of her and met the observer's with calm. Whatever you might say of Marian, she was not sentimental. And her dignity was instinctive. She loved solid things, like velvet or marble or an unimpeachable position in the community. Well, he had given her the chance to maintain her dignity. He had removed from her environment all that was bare or cheap. He had made her happiness the anvil of his life, and in the manner of those who live through the organization of their environment, she was happy. She had furnished their home as she wished it, she belonged to clubs, she managed charities, she headed committees for the relief of foreign peoples. . . . His hands straightened the pile of letters, while his eyes rested on the face in the picture. The past, which he had seen for a moment that morning in Dorothy's eyes, had struck chords of desire deep within him. His soul hungered. The papers cut his fingers like nettles; the walls about him exuded an odor of leather. Usually he savored that rich smell, but to-day it was sickening.

The telegram on the top of the pile was from Mears, the Pittsburgh salesman, and was disagreeable. Mears always was.

"Trial order 172-M Alleghany Electric not yet received," it read. "Have you shipped? Competition here stiff. Our efforts in the field useless without cooperation home office. Mears."

John looked past the yellow sheet of paper at his desk. But the desk stretched itself out and out, as in retreating mirrors, until it reached twenty years into the past, a narrowing streak, at the end of which he saw a boy lying on his back un