s
wife and lets her make a fool of herself and him. It's his
unconfessed, and perhaps unadmitted, remorse seeking a short cut to
forgiveness.

It seems that I played too much pool and billiards for a small boy; and
got into too much city mischief, for I learned at the end of a
delightful Newport summer that I was to finish my schooling, not at Mr.
Cutter's, but at Groton.

IV

In those Groton days I let matches strictly alone; I neither played
with them, nor used them to light cigarettes with. I was vaguely
ambitious to be great and splendid, and I was down on purposeless boys
who didn't behave themselves.

Lucy's brother was in my form. She used to come to visit him, with her
parents, in their car. Even for Groton parents the Ludlows were
enormously rich, or if they weren't enormously rich, they were enormous
spenders.

Lucy was seven years our junior, but even in those baby days she had
the laughing mouth and the praying eyes that were to play such havoc
later on. She was a child of the world; natural, straightforward, and
easy-going.

Lucy at nine was so pretty, so engaging, and had so much charm and
magnetism that I remember having regretted, very solemnly, and with
youthful finality, that we did not belong to the same generation. I
was sorry that she was not fifteen or sixteen like myself; so that I
could be in love with her and she with me!

Once Lucy was so sick that they thought she was going to die, and
Schuyler was called home from school. The whole school was affected,
so strong and vivid was its memory of an engaging and fearless child.
I remember being sorrier than ever that I had been confirmed into a
system which makes disease contagious instead of health, and asking one
of the masters how he reconciled the death of a kid like that, whom
everybody loved, with his conception of an all-wise and all-merciful
God. He answered, it has always seemed to me very lamely, that if we
didn't believe that all was for the best, in this best of all worlds,
we should never get anywhere.

All for the best! If we are to forgive the Power that sets him on, why
not the murderer himself who does the real dirty work? If _all_ is for
the best, so then must the component parts of all (each and every) be
for the best. In short we can do no wrong in this best of worlds. Oh,
what grim, weak-minded nonsense they prate and preach!

There was hand-clapping when the Rector told us that Schuyler Ludlow's