Neale had a suspicion that very likely the boy would be horrified by Senegal, not get on a bit better than in Bourges, and be mighty glad to come back to the safeness and comfort that irked him so now. If he had had pep enough to get on in Senegal, or anywhere else on his own, wouldn't he have had pep enough to cut loose from his leading-strings before this? Now was the time to do it, now or never, before he had acquired any personal responsibilities of his own choosing, that would _really_ be an insuperable barrier to change. Neale felt nothing but the profoundest sympathy for people who found out they were in the wrong pigeon-hole after they had tied themselves up so they couldn't move. That was so awful a fate, that it did seem as though all grown-ups ought to league together in an impassioned effort to give youth as free a choice as possible. Instead of which--look what they'd done to this poor kid! Neale knew by the look of him how nervously sensitive he was. They'd trained nervous sensibility into him, instead of energy and combativeness. And then they brought to bear on him the thousand-pound-to-the-square-inch pressure of public opinion which provincial and family life in a small French town exerts on youth, to prevent its ever guessing at its essential freedom to seek out its own. What sheep men were! ... making long detours through open country to get around fences that had long since blown down. In all the centuries of Roman Emperors had there been a single one of the misfits with good enough sense to see that he had got into the wrong job, and energy enough to pull out? Galba had declined the nomination a term or two, but in the end he'd accepted office--and got his throat cut inside a year. Even a high-class mind like Marcus Aurelius could think of no solution except, after office-hours, to write a book sympathizing with himself, like a fine-haired Corporation President solacing his soul by collecting cloisonne. Of course the fashion of the country and the century was sure to fit some men. Old man Gates now: he _had_ wanted to succeed in business, to be a millionaire, as much as Vespasian had wanted to be Emperor, and he had furiously enjoyed every hard-hitting moment of the life-and-death struggle which had carried him up from owning a small saw-mill in Connecticut to being the head of a rich and powerful company. He had died at eighty, as lusty and hard and sound an old condottiere as any other professional fighter who bestrode a bronze horse in an Italian piazza. But how about his son? What perhaps would the "young Mr. Gates" have liked to do with _his_ life, if it had ever been suggested to him that he might do something else than go on making money by selling lumber for as much as possible above the price that had been paid for it? What life-long mal-adjustment had resulted in that dreadful, twisted, weeping, elderly face which even now Neale could not forget?