nce of being alone with his boy.

There was no reason why he should not seize it, except the profound one
that he had lost the habit of travel. May had disliked to move except
for valid reasons, such as taking the children to the sea or in the
mountains: she could imagine no other motive for leaving the house in
Thirty-ninth Street or their comfortable quarters at the Wellands' in
Newport. After Dallas had taken his degree she had thought it her duty
to travel for six months; and the whole family had made the
old-fashioned tour through England, Switzerland and Italy. Their time
being limited (no one knew why) they had omitted France. Archer
remembered Dallas's wrath at being asked to contemplate Mont Blanc
instead of Rheims and Chartres. But Mary and Bill wanted
mountain-climbing, and had already yawned their way in Dallas's wake
through the English cathedrals; and May, always fair to her children,
had insisted on holding the balance evenly between their athletic and
artistic proclivities. She had indeed proposed that her husband should
go to Paris for a fortnight, and join them on the Italian lakes after
they had "done" Switzerland; but Archer had declined. "We'll stick
together," he said; and May's face had brightened at his setting such a
good example to Dallas.

Since her death, nearly two years before, there had been no reason for
his continuing in the same routine. His children had urged him to
travel: Mary Chivers had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad
and "see the galleries." The very mysteriousness of such a cure made
her the more confident of its efficacy. But Archer had found himself
held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from
new things.

Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for
doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his
generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong,
honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little
scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man's imagination,
so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily
level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and
wondered....

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose
standards had bent and bound him? He remembered a sneering prophecy of
poor Lawrence Leffer