nds.

Over on Broadway a child of his fertile brain was holding the rapt
attention of several hundred men and women; and across the broad land
that night four other dramas were being successfully acted. People
were discussing his theories, denouncing or approving his conception
of life. The struggle was past, his royalties were making him rich.
And here he was this night, drinking the cup of bitterness, of
unhappiness, the astringent draft of things that might and should have
been. The coveted grape was sour, the desired apple was withered.
Those who traverse the road with Folly as boon companion find only
emptiness.

And so it was with Warrington. He had once been good, wholly good and
kind and wise, lofty as a rural poet who has seen nothing of life save
nature's pure and visible face. In the heat of battle he had been
strong, but success had subtly eaten into the fibers and loosed his
hold, and had swept him onward into that whirlpool out of which no man
emerges wholly undefiled. It takes a great and strong man to withstand
success, and Warrington was only a genius. It was not from lack of
will power; rather it was because he was easy-going and loved pleasure
for its own sake. He had fought and starved, and now for the jingle of
the guinea in his pocket and the junkets of the gay! The prodigality
of these creative beings is not fully understood by the laity, else
they would forgive more readily the transgressions. Besides, the
harbor of family ties is a man's moral bulwark; and Warrington drifted
hither and thither with no harbor in view at all.

He had been an orphan since his birth; a mother meant simply a giver
of life, and a father meant, even less. Until he had read the reverse
and obverse sides of life, his sense of morality had lain dormant and
untilled. Such was his misfortune. The solitary relative he laid claim
to was an aged aunt, his father's sister. For her he had purchased a
beautiful place in the town of his birth, vaguely intending to live
out his old age there.

There had been a fight for all he possessed. Good had not come easily,
as it does to some particularly favored mortals. There was no family,
aristocracy to back him up, no melancholy recollections of past
grandeur to add the interest of romance to his endeavors. His father
had been a poor man of the people, a farmer. And yet Warrington was by
no means plebeian. Somewhere there was a fine strain. It had been a
fierce struggle to complete