himself.

"Oh," she whispered, "how happy he must have been! How happy! To have
written this! If I had done it----"

She paused and sat up straight and still, the book falling unheeded
from her hand. Slowly her eyes widened, filled first with light and
then with tears.

"If I had written this! If I could write _anything_!"

And suddenly, for that moment and for life, she knew!

"_That_ is what I want--to _write_!--to _make_ something beautiful!"

And then her guardian angel should have pushed her into the cage and
fastened its door. For the sun was shining and the south wind was
blowing--and it was the right cage!

CHAPTER V

One September afternoon, Peter lingered in his class-room after his
duties were done and his pupils had departed. He usually lost no time
in shaking the dust of academic toil from his feet--and from his
mind--but to-day an unwonted longing for some steadying purpose, some
_raison d'etre_, made him remain to dally with the tools of his
occupation, perhaps in a wistful hope that he might discover a hitherto
unsuspected charm in the teaching of rhetoric to reluctant young girls.

"If they only cared," he thought, "if they only cared a little for the
English language, it wouldn't be such a deadly grind to teach I them.
But _they'll_ never 'contend for the shade of a world.' It's just a
dull necessity to them--this business of learning how to use their
mother tongue--except, of course, to Sheila. And next year she won't
be here to help me endure it. Oh, how I wish I could get away--to
something better, something bigger!"

But with the wish, there came to him also the certainty of its
futility. He wouldn't get away; the next year, and the year following,
and the year after that would find him still at his uninspiring post in
the Shadyville Seminary, teaching bored pupils the properties of
speech, and inwardly cursing himself for doing it.

For Peter knew that he would always be the victim of his own laziness;
that every impulse toward a broader life and its achievements would be
checked and overcome by what he termed his "vast inertia." In spite of
his mental capacity, his social gifts, his assets of birth and
excellent appearance, he would go through all his years without
attaining either honors or profits--merely because, in his
unconquerable languor, he would not exert himself to the extent of
reaching out his hand for them.

He taught in the seminary because he must;