I-lay-me" God, what life was given to him for. He fabricated a
legend that she was selling herself for gold, and when the haughty
manner and the blonde sped by David's window behind jingling
sleigh-bells that winter, David, sitting at the machine, got back proofs
from the front office that looked like war-maps of a strange country.
Moreover he let his matrices go uncleaned until they were beardy as
wheat and the bill of repairs on the machine had begun to rise like a
cat's back.

All of this may seem funny in the telling, but to see the little
Welshman's heart breaking in him was no pleasant matter. The girls in
the office pitied the boy, and hoped the silk-drummer would break her
heart. The town and the Imperial Club, whereof David was much beloved,
took sides with him, and knew his sorrow for their own. As for the
blonde, it was only nature asserting itself in her; so David got back
his little chip diamonds, and his bangle bracelet, and his copy of
"Riley's Love Songs," and there was the "mist and the blinding rain" for
him, and the snow of winter hardened on the sidewalks.

To console himself, the boy traded for a music-box, which he set going
with a long brass lever. Its various tunes were picked in holes on
circular steel sheets, which were fed into the box and set whirling with
the lever. At night when Larmy wasn't enjoying what David called a
spook-fest, the boy would sit in the office by the hour and listen to
his music-box. He must have played "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" a
hundred lonesome times that winter (it had been their favourite
waltz--his and the girl's--at the Imperial Club), and it was a safe
guess that if the boys in the office, as they passed the box at noon,
would give the lever a yank, from the abdomen of the contrivance the
waltz song would begin deep and low to rumble and swell out with all the
simulation of sorrow that a mechanical soul may express.

As the winter deepened, Larmy and the reporter and the "father" had more
and more converse. The "father" explained a theory of immortality which
did not interest the reporter, but which Larmy heard eagerly. It said
that science would resolve matter into mere forms of motion, which are
expressions of divine will, and that the only place where this divine
will exists in its pure state, eluding the so-called material state, is
in the human soul. Further, the "father" explained that this soul, or
divine will, exists without the brain, independent o