and I remembered that whatever
prairie-life had cost me, it had not cost me the health of my family.
My two bairns had been free of those illnesses and infections which
come to the city child, and I was glad enough to remember it. But I
was unconscious of Dinky-Dunk's cynic eye on me as I sat there
brooding over my chicks. When he spoke to me, in fact, I was thinking
how odd it was that Josie Langdon, on the very day before her
marriage, should have carried me down to the lower end of Fifth Avenue
and led me into the schoolroom of the Church of the Ascension, and
asked me to study Sorolla's _Triste Herencia_ which hangs there.

I can still see that wonderful canvas where the foreshore of Valencia,
usually so vivacious with running figures and the brightest of
sunlight on dancing sails, had been made the wine-dark sea of the
pagan questioner with the weight of immemorial human woe to shadow it.
Josie had been asking me about marriage and children, for even she was
knowing her more solemn moments in the midst of all that feverishly
organized merriment. But I was surprised, when she slipped a hand
through my arm, to see a tear run down her nose. So I looked up again
at Sorolla's picture of the naked little cripples snatching at their
moment's joy along the water's edge, at his huddled group of maimed
and cast-off orphans trying to be happy without quite knowing how. I
can still see the stunted little bodies, naked in sunlight that
seemed revealing without being invigorating, clustered about the
guardian figure of the tall old priest in black, the somberly
benignant old figure that towered above the little wrecks on crutches
and faced, as majestic as Millet's _Sower_, as austere and unmoved as
Fate itself, a dark sea overhung by a dark sky. Sorolla was great in
that picture, to my way of thinking. He was great in the manner in
which he attunes nature to a human mood, in which he gives you the
sunlight muffled, in some way, like the sunlight during a partial
eclipse, and keys turbulence down to quietude, like the soft pedal
that falls on a noisy street when a hearse goes by.

Josie felt it, and I felt it, that wordless thinning down of radiance,
that mysterious holding back of warmth, until it seemed to strike a
chill into the bones. It was the darker wing of Destiny hovering over
man's head, deepening at the same time that it shadows the receding
sky-line, so that even the memory of it, a thousand miles away, could
drain