“The trouble with most young colts who fly into matrimony with the first exhibit of the sex that sashays along, is that they seem to forget they’re gonna have thirty to fifty years of it,” comments Uncle Joe Fodder, when he hears of some particularly rash marriage about the village. “If a feller can’t be good, b’dam, why can’t he be careful?” IV Milly gave it out that Mary Ann was snobbish and “stuck up”, that she couldn’t be sociable and neighborly if it cost her a leg—because she never accepted another invitation from Milly—and her personal opinion was that Nathan’s bosom friend had married a “quince.” Mary Ann gave a dinner party for a number of the summer colonists on Preston Hill shortly afterward and neglected to invite Milly. “After me about breakin’ my neck to give her that swell feed to our house in March!” lamented Milly. “She’s a cat and I hope she chokes on her own cream.” Nathan never referred to the dinner thereafter, however. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V ALWAYS JUSTIFIED I The Grand Hotel in Yokohama, Japan, is built close to the edge of Tokio Bay. Only the width of a macadam street separates it from a walled embankment with a twenty-foot drop down to the harbor water. It is a long, red building with a wide portico running the entire length of the eastern side. Tourists from the seven corners of the earth sit before the great, opened windows and gaze across the blue waters where outgoing liners are heading for home. In a wicker lounging chair before one of those great windows at twilight of an August day in 1916 sat an oldish man with weak, watery eyes and a petulant mouth. He was dressed in white pongee, somewhat rumpled, and in his lap he toyed with a wide-brimmed Panama hat. His eyes were far away; he too was thinking of those liners, outward bound, heading for home. Home! Johnathan Forge had never had a home. Or so he told himself. A house, a wife, children, expense, all these, yes! But a home, never! It was his wife’s fault. She had never been a home-maker from the beginning. His thoughts turned backward this August afternoon back to America—New England—Vermont! He wondered about the people he had known so long and so intimately there. What had happened after he left them? How had they fared? What were they doing—now—this afternoon—this moment? Johnathan Forge believed that life had given him a scurvy deal.