middle age, unsuccessful according to the
standard of the world. He was one of those inglorious failures, a man
who has failed to follow out his chosen course of life. He was one
who had turned back, overcome confessedly by odds. He told himself
proudly and simply that his earning of money was, to one simple and
honest end--the prolonging of existence on the earth for the good of
one's fellow-beings, and one's own growth; that he was attaining that
end more completely in his little grocery store than he had ever done
in his law-office. Yet always he saw himself, in a measure, as others
saw him, and the humility of his position in the eyes of the world
asserted itself. While he felt not the slightest bend in the
erectness of his own soul because of it, while it even amused him, he
never forgot the supercilious courtesy of the girls' father towards
him. He recognized, even while feeling himself on superior heights,
the downward vision of the man who robbed him. It was true that he
paid scorn for scorn, but he was forced to take as well as give.

He also was not in the slightest doubt as to Charlotte's own attitude
towards him. He understood to the full the signification of the word
grocer for her. He was, to her mind, hardly a man at all, rather a
mechanical dispenser of butter and eggs for the needs of a superior
race. But he understood also the childish innocence and
involuntariness of this view of hers. He recognized even the
ludicrousness of the situation which perverted tragedy to comedy,
almost Cyrano fashion. He compared himself to Cyrano.

"As well consider the possibility of marriage with a girl of her
training, even although it is on a false basis, with a monstrosity of
nose on my face, as with the legend of retail grocery across my
scutcheon," he told himself. He even laughed over it.

Therefore, being of a turn of mind which can rear for itself airy
towers of delight over the values of insufficiency of life, and
having an access of spirituality which enabled him to get a certain
reality from them, he dreamed on, and let his new love irradiate his
own life, like a man carrying a lantern on a dark path. There are
those that are born to sunlit paths, and there are those whom a
beneficient Providence has supplied with lanterns of compensation,
and the latter are not always the unhappier nor the less progressive.
Never admitting to himself the possibility of the actual presence of
the girl in the house as his wi