who had sent me there, when it was she who had set me
free for a time from the harbor which was now dragging me back, when it
was she from the very start who had fostered this passion for "all that
is fine." I remembered her now--remembered and remembered--until her
dear image filled me.

My father's letter went on to tell how she had fought for her life.
Three operations, all three of them failures, but still she had held
bravely on in hopes of some new discovery which science might make and
so bring her a cure. A thought suddenly gripped me and struck me cold.
It had all depended on science, on men working calmly and coldly along
in laboratories all over the world, while my mother had held to her
thread of life and hoped that these laboratory gods would hurry, hurry
while yet there was time! How many thousands like her every day, every
hour all over the world were watching those gods with that awful
suspense. For they were the only gods that were left, and a comfortless
set of gods they were! They were like J. K., they had hay minds! They
were businesslike, relentless, cold, they belonged to the world of the
harbor! My mother's kind god was a myth and a joke, with no power here
one way or the other. I _felt_ that now, I had _thought_ it before, only
thought it, with that gay freedom of thought we had aired back there in
Paris. But I knew now that deep underneath I had believed all along in
this god of hers, as I had in my beautiful goddess of art and in all the
things that were fine. It had taken this news from the harbor to bring
him tottering, crashing down. For no god like hers would have let her
die! And I felt fear now, the fear of Death, whom I'd never really
noticed before and who now seemed to say to me,

"She is nothing--has gone nowhere--she is only dead!"

And fiercely in a bewildered way I rebelled against this emptiness. I
rebelled against this world of hay that was so abruptly dragging me back
to a sense of its almighty grip on my life. When my ship came up the
Bay, the world looked harsh and gray to me, though there was a bright
and sunny glare on the muddy waves of the harbor.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

My mother had been buried several days before I reached home.

I found Sue waiting on the dock, and I saw with a little shock of
surprise that my young sister was grown up. I had never noticed her much
before. Sue and I had never got on from the start. She had been my
father's chum and I had