McComas, as you can guess, was very bland, very expansive, very
magnanimous (to his own sense). "I _like_ Albert!" he declared heartily.
But he did little to cloak the fact that it was his own money which was
to carry the boy through college.

Raymond was in the depths for a month. After Gluckstein had got his deed
for the house and Albert had packed his trunk for the East, he felt that
now indeed he had lost wife, home and son.

PART VIII

I

Before leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal
fortnight in going over old papers--out-of-date documents which once had
interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda
which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited,
encumbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were
several faded agreements with the signature of the ineffable individual
who had married into the family, had received a quit-claim to those
suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them
back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills--among them one for the
set of parlor furniture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second
Empire. There were drafts of Raymond's early compositions--his first
attempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily
annotated Virgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in
which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of
intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and
inserted on bits of blue paper....

"I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically.

I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two
or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once--near the end of
a long life, of a succession of lives.

I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.

Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote.
He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since
out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He
also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity--a
vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of
the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have
held on to life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting
trek.

From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and
picture-exhibitions. I do not