nch behind the door of the last car a narrow space in
which he squeezed himself.

"I'll have to stop it," he said decisively.

He drew from his breast pocket a note-book and a pencil. Opening the book
out across his knees, he bent over it and began to draw. He worked with
concentration, but seemingly with little result, for he drew only
detached lines. There were spirals, circles, ovals, parabolas; lines
that curved upward, broke, and curved again downward, like gothic arches;
lines that curved in gentle languor; lines that breathed like the
undulations of a peaceful sea; and then just zipping, swift, straight
lines that shot up to the upper end of the paper and seemed to continue
invisibly toward an altitudinous nowhere. This is all he drew, and yet as
he worked there was in his face the set of stubborn purpose, and in his
eyes the glow of aspiration. He tried to make each line beautiful and
firm and swift and pure. When he succeeded, he felt within him
the bubbling of a sweet contentment. This would be followed by
dissatisfaction, renewed yearning--and he would begin again.

"By Jove!" he muttered in sudden consternation, straightening away from
the book.

And then, "They began at the same time."

And a moment later, "And they are the same."

It had struck him abruptly that the strange urge which made him draw
lines was like that which at times convulsed his body into that
mysterious manifestation which, for the want of a better word, he called
his "flapping." The two things had begun together, and they were of the
same essence. The impulse which possessed him as he tried for beauty with
paper and pencil was the same which swelled his lungs and his heart,
which made him rise a-tip-toe and wave his arms. It came from a feeling
of subtle and inexplicable dissatisfaction; it was made of a vague and
vast longing. It was the same which, when a boy, had sent him to the
brake-beam, the circus, and the sea; it was to be distrusted.

He slammed the book shut and put it in his pocket. "No more of this," he
said.

A certain confidence, though, came gradually into his eyes. "After all,
these things do not mean much now," he thought. "I was a boy, then, and
unhappy. I am a man, now, and happy."

His mind idled back over the two years since his marriage, over the warm
coziness of the last two years. What a wife, this little Dolly! What a
little swaddler! She wrapped up everything as in cotton--all the
asperities of Life,