Out here under the inexorable spaces of the
sky, a deep distaste of his own life took possession of him. He felt
like giving it all up. He thought of the infinite tragedy of these
lives which the world loves to call "peaceful and pastoral." HIS
mind went out in the aim to help them. What could he do to make
life better worth living? Nothing. They must live and die
practically as he saw them tonight.
And yet he knew this was a mood, and that in a few hours the love
and the habit of life would come back upon him and upon them;
that he would go back to the city in a few days; that these people
would live on and make the best of it.
"I'll make the best of it," he said at last, and his thought came back
to his mother and Grant.
IV
The next day was a rainy day; not a shower, but a steady rain-an
unusual thing in midsummer in the West. A cold, dismal day in the
fireless, colorless farmhouses. It came to Howard in that peculiar
reaction which surely comes during a visit of this character, when
thought is a weariness, when the visitor longs for his own familiar
walls and pictures and books, and longs to meet his friends, feeling
at the same time the tragedy of life which makes friends nearer
and more congenial than blood relations.
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