y."

"I'll be careful, never fear!" he replied with a laugh, as he took up
his bag and opened the door. A few minutes later, when he was leaving
the house, he reflected that the fifty dollars in his pocket would keep
life in him for a considerable time in Dinwiddie.

CHAPTER VI

A TREADWELL IN REVOLT

York Street, in which Mrs. Peachey lived and supplied the necessaries of
life to a dozen boarders, ran like a frayed seam of gentility between
the prosperous and the impoverished quarters of Dinwiddie; and in order
to reach it, Oliver was obliged to pass the rectory, where, though he
did not see her, Virginia sat in stiffly starched muslin on the old
horsehair sofa. The fragrance of honeysuckle floated to his nostrils
from the dim garden, but so absorbed was he in the engrossing problems
of the moment, that only after he had passed the tower of the church did
he remember that the house behind him sheltered the girl who reminded
him of one of the adorable young virgins of Perugino. For an instant he
permitted himself to dwell longingly on the expression of gentle
goodness that looked from her face; but this memory proved so
disturbing, that he put it obdurately away from him while he returned to
the prudent consideration of the fifty dollars in his pocket. The appeal
of first love had been almost as urgent to him as to Virginia; but the
emotion which had visited both alike had affected each differently, and
this difference was due to the fundamental distinction between woman,
for whom love is the supreme preoccupation of being, and man, to whom it
is at best a partial manifestation of energy. To the woman nothing else
really mattered; to the man at least a dozen other pursuits mattered
very nearly as much.

The sultriness of the weather dampened his body, but not his spirits,
and as he walked on, carrying his heavy bag, along York Street, his
consciousness of the tremendous importance to the world of his decision
exhilarated him like a tonic. He had freed himself from Cyrus and from
commercialism at a single blow, and it had all been as easy as talking!
The joke about starvation he had of course indulged in merely for the
exquisite pleasure of arousing Susan. He wasn't going to starve; nobody
was going to starve in Dinwiddie on thirty dollars a month, and there
was no doubt in the world of his ability to make that much by his
reviewing. It was all simple enough. What he intended to do was to write
the national