of the three fell
sisters, she of the implacable front and deep-set, burning eyes, had
entered with him to pace evenly as he paced, and to lay a maddening
finger on his soul.

Without vowing a vow and confirming it with an oath, he had partly
turned a new life-leaf on the night of heavenly comfort when Ardea had
sent him forth to tramp the pike with her kiss of sisterly love still
caressing him. Beyond the needs of the moment, the recall of Norman and
the determination to turn his back on the world struggle for the time
being, he had not gone in that first fervor of the uplifting impulse.
But later on there had been other steps: a growing hunger for success
with self-respect kept whole; a dulling of the sharp edge of his hatred
for the Farleys; a meliorating of his fierce contempt for all the
hypocrites, conscious and subconscious.

With the changing point of view had come a corresponding change in the
life. The men of his class had marked it, and there were helping hands
held out, as there always are when one struggles toward the forward
margin of any Slough of Despond. He had even gone to church at long
intervals, having there the good hap to fall under the influence of a
man whose faults were neither of ignorance nor of insincerity.

In these surface-scratchings of the heart soil there had sprung up a
mixed growth in which the tares of self-righteousness began presently to
overtop the good grain of humility. One must not be too exacting. If the
world were not all good, neither was it all bad; at all events, it was
the part of wisdom to make the magnanimous best of it, and to be
thankful that the day-star of reason had at last arisen for one's self.
At the close of his college course he would go home prepared to deal
firmly but justly with the Farleys, prepared to show Ardea and the small
world of Paradise a pattern of business rectitude, of filial devotion,
of upright, honorable manhood. As Ardea had said, the example was
needed; it should be forthcoming. And perhaps, in the dim and distant
future, Ardea herself would look back to the night when her word and her
kiss had fashioned a man after her own heart, and be--not sorry (true
love was still stronger than prideful Phariseeism here), but a little
regretful, it might be, that her love could not have gone where it was
sent.

And now.... With Alecto's maddening finger pressed on the soul-hurt, no
man is responsible. After the furious storm of upbubbling curses h