Kendall Ware had set foot on the French liner bound for France early in May; he had landed at Bordeaux, May 19th. It was now the last of June. Less than two months had passed over his head, but the Kendall Ware who paced the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne this evening was years removed from the boy who walked the decks of the _Rochambeau_ with Maude Knox. He was altered as only years of experience could have altered him in the times when men went about their business after the manner of rational human beings, when death was not a profession which engaged the world, when the dollar was the measure of success, when one day was like another, and meat could be eaten seven days in the week. The great modification in him was that he had learned it to be true that man is a thinking animal and that the brain may be used for something besides adding a column of figures or as a storage-house for the thoughts of a past generation. He had perceived that different theories of life existed in the world. He had been seized by events and forcibly fed with something which might crystallize into knowledge, and he had arrived at that unpleasant junction in the railroad system of life where he must choose between trains—whether he would board the one which went ahead swiftly through the Country of Responsible Individual Thought or the one which lagged backward through the Land of Swallowed Dogmas.... He was not happy. He was making another discovery—namely, that one can theorize very comfortably, but that when one transmutes theory into accomplished fact, theory has become practice, and speculations upon its results may be exceedingly unpleasant. Within the last twenty-four hours Kendall had translated one theory into a fact, and another fact had arrived, needing no transmutation. The theory was the little-moment-of-happiness theory, and the fact was a letter from his mother. That morning after he had left Andree he was rather disappointed to find that he suffered no remorse, experienced no sense of having done what he should have left undone. Andree was Andree, sweet, good, lovable. Because she was so, and because of his certainty of her cleanness of soul, he felt no sense of degradation or of having transgressed. He was even happy, rejoicing, boylike, in the sweetness of the gift of her love.... He found his mother’s letter at the office and, having read it, his romance was smirched with sordidness, its beauty was dulled by the intrusion of harsh, unsparing, cold convention. The Middle West had intruded upon Paris, and he was discovering that there was much Middle West remaining alive in him. His mother’s letter had said, and he could visualize her face as she wrote, severe, unyielding, harsh, forbidding: