some "melancholy story," as the
clipping put it.

He bent over the deed spread out upon the table, following with his
finger the long line of transfers: "'To John Valyante,'" he muttered;
"what odd spelling! 'Robert Valyant'--without the 'e.' Here, in 1730,
the 'y' begins to be 'i.'" There was something strenuous and appealing
in the long line of dates. "Valiant. Always a Valiant. How they held on
to it! There's never a break."

A curious pride, new-born and self-conscious, was dawning in him. He was
descended from ancestors who had been no weaklings. A Valiant had
settled on those acres under a royal governor, before the old frontier
fighting was over and the Indians had sullenly retired to the westward.
The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their strong
bodies and their stronger hearts to raze the forests and turn the
primeval jungles into golden plantations. Except as regarded his father,
Valiant had never known ancestral pride before. He had been proud of
his strong and healthy frame, of his ability to ride like a dragoon,
unconsciously, perhaps, a little proud of his wealth. But pride in the
larger sense, reverence for the past based upon a respect for ancient
lineage, he had never known until this moment.

Where was his facetious concept of Virginia now? He remembered his
characterization of it with a wincing half-humorous mortification--a
slender needle-prick of shame. The empty pretensions, subsisting on
the vanished glories of the past, had suddenly acquired character and
meaning. He himself was a Virginian.

There below him stretched the great canoned city, its avenues roaring
with nightly gaiety, its roadways bright with the beams of shuttling
motors, its theaters and cafes brilliant with women in throbbing hues
and men in black and white, and its "Great White Way" blazing with
incandescents, interminable and alluring--an apotheosis of fevered
movement and hectic color. He knew suddenly that he was sick of it
all: its jostle and glitter, its mad race after bubbles, its hideous
under-surface contrasts of wealth and squalor, its lukewarm friendships
and false standards which he had been so bitterly unlearning. He knew
that, for all his self-pity, he was at heart full of a tired longing for
wide uncrowded nature, for green breezy interludes and a sky of
untainted sunlight or peaceful stars.

There stole into his mood an eery suggestion of intention. Why should
the date assigned for th