as going
my best. I'll have to take you over to see her to-morrow."

Carl dropped the end of his cigar softly among the castor beans and
sighed. "Yes, I suppose I must see the old place. I'm cowardly
about things that remind me of myself. It took courage to come
at all, Alexandra. I wouldn't have, if I hadn't wanted to see you
very, very much."

Alexandra looked at him with her calm, deliberate eyes. "Why do
you dread things like that, Carl?" she asked earnestly. "Why are
you dissatisfied with yourself?"

Her visitor winced. "How direct you are, Alexandra! Just like
you used to be. Do I give myself away so quickly? Well, you see,
for one thing, there's nothing to look forward to in my profession.
Wood-engraving is the only thing I care about, and that had gone out
before I began. Everything's cheap metal work nowadays, touching
up miserable photographs, forcing up poor drawings, and spoiling good
ones. I'm absolutely sick of it all." Carl frowned. "Alexandra,
all the way out from New York I've been planning how I could
deceive you and make you think me a very enviable fellow, and here
I am telling you the truth the first night. I waste a lot of time
pretending to people, and the joke of it is, I don't think I ever
deceive any one. There are too many of my kind; people know us on
sight."

Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a
puzzled, thoughtful gesture. "You see," he went on calmly, "measured
by your standards here, I'm a failure. I couldn't buy even one of
your cornfields. I've enjoyed a great many things, but I've got
nothing to show for it all."

"But you show for it yourself, Carl. I'd rather have had your
freedom than my land."

Carl shook his head mournfully. "Freedom so often means that one
isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a
background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the
cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all
alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one
of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and
the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind
us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or
whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to
do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for
a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no
house, no place, no people of our own. We liv