his
entire career for some fantastic imagination; some cause or idea or even
(so her fancy ran) for some woman seen from a railway train, hanging up
clothes in a back yard. When he had found this beauty or this cause,
no force, she knew, would avail to restrain him from pursuit of it. She
suspected the East also, and always fidgeted herself when she saw him
with a book of Indian travels in his hand, as though he were sucking
contagion from the page. On the other hand, no common love affair, had
there been such a thing, would have caused her a moment's uneasiness
where Ralph was concerned. He was destined in her fancy for something
splendid in the way of success or failure, she knew not which.

And yet nobody could have worked harder or done better in all the
recognized stages of a young man's life than Ralph had done, and Joan
had to gather materials for her fears from trifles in her brother's
behavior which would have escaped any other eye. It was natural that
she should be anxious. Life had been so arduous for all of them from
the start that she could not help dreading any sudden relaxation of his
grasp upon what he held, though, as she knew from inspection of her own
life, such sudden impulse to let go and make away from the discipline
and the drudgery was sometimes almost irresistible. But with Ralph,
if he broke away, she knew that it would be only to put himself under
harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under
a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some
fly; she figured him living by the labor of his hands in some city slum,
the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong which
were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in the house
of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half proudly, and
wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as they sat, late at night,
talking together over the gas-stove in Ralph's bedroom.

It is likely that Ralph would not have recognized his own dream of a
future in the forecasts which disturbed his sister's peace of mind.
Certainly, if any one of them had been put before him he would have
rejected it with a laugh, as the sort of life that held no attractions
for him. He could not have said how it was that he had put these absurd
notions into his sister's head. Indeed, he prided himself upon being
well broken into a life of hard work, about which he had no sort of
illusions. His vision of