Johnathan Forge did not return that evening. All that night he walked the streets, debating whether he should call down God’s curses on his boy. He actually believed that if he did, the son’s life would be blasted forever. Morning came cold and gray and clammy across the eastern hills. But in the morning the Forge household resumed the even tenor of its way. Only Johnathan did not speak to his son for four days and then only on matters of absolute necessity. Nathan, however, had made a discovery. This is a world in which people suffer and endure exactly what they choose to suffer and not much more. When the worm turns, ninety per cent. of the early birds turn also. As a discovery, it opened many prolific possibilities. VI Johnathan, on that night’s walk, however, had determined upon a maneuver and reached a great decision. If he could not control his son by scoring his body with a harness tug for the good of his soul, he would employ tact and discretion. In order to save his son from a horrible life of poetry, he would get into some business, ostensibly of a manufacturing nature, which might grip his boy’s interest as his own, and set up an industrial counter-irritant to poetic pathology. If Nathan hadn’t written that Pagan poem and set his father by the ears, Johnathan would never have gone into business and taken Nathan with him. And if he had not gone into business and taken Nathan with him, all the course of the boy’s life would have been changed. Viewed from the perspective of the present, truly it was a happy stroke,—writing that Pagan poem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XV VALLEY LAMPS I Madelaine Theddon was seventeen that autumn. She was one of those rare girls who seem to slip subtly into maturity while contemporaries of equal age are giggling over pimply-faced lovers, locking themselves away in bedrooms to indite silly _billet-doux_, sighing over novels or clandestinely “putting up their hair.” On an afternoon in mid-September she had climbed Mt. Tom with a party of schoolmates older than herself in nothing but years. They had accidentally (?) encountered college boys from Amherst. They lunched, flirted, drank and danced in the great, airy Summit House. Madelaine was an accomplished dancer because of her litheness and exquisite grace of carriage. Yet to-day she had not cared for dancing. “Old Mother Hubbard” the boys often nicknamed her,—and left her alone. It was increasingly difficult for Madelaine to endure the crudities and vaporings of slangy, big-footed adolescence. They had left her much alone to-day.