And suffering agony though I am, there is now in me a strange new sense of familiarity with suffering. Anguish and heartache, thank God, are no longer novelties. That much anodyne the sheer business of living does bring to one. I am as sensitive to them as ever I was in my prehistoric days of ease and leisure and reclusion, but they are old acquaintances now. I must go on, hiding my dolor as best I can, working for the sunny comely lad, Jimmie, so brilliant with promise, for the grave sweet-faced Laura, replica of her mother, and—yes—for Randolph and Alicia. I cannot rant and I must not betray any grief or make a spectacle of myself before them. I must carry on. "Small as might be your lamp," observes the sage of Belgium, "never part with the oil that feeds it, but only give the flame that crowns it." A poor and tenuous oil is that of my peculiar lamp, a petty flame and a murky result. But such as they are, I must guard them. I cannot down the feeling, however, that there is some mystery, some secret reason behind this lightning-like development between Alicia and the boy. With a leaden heart I must record it that he has proven a disappointment to me. His mediocrity as a student concerns me less than his general tendency to shiftiness, his unsteady eye and his heavy drooping nether lip when he tells me that he "spent the night with the fellows at the frat house", that "a fellow’s got to associate with friends of his own age", that "he’s got to make friends", and so on. He is through his allowance four days after receiving it and repeatedly begs for more. More than once I have caught the odor of alcohol about him as he came in late at night, and only the fact that he is Laura’s boy and that I have reared him has made me condone his many offenses. Have I been spoiling him, I wonder? Would I have condoned and tolerated as much if he were my own son? He is over a year younger than Alicia and though a handsome enough lad in his way, I fancy I see too much of Pendleton in his face for comfort. His father also was markedly good-looking when he married poor Laura. Have I, I wonder, been rearing another Pendleton? But Alicia, the bright, the fair, the radiant, almost a woman now, with more wisdom than I ever before found in women—how came she to do such a thing as to engage herself to him? I can understand his possible infatuation. But a girl, I had always believed, learns her woman’s arts by instinct. How can she be so blind to the boy’s character and defects? Can it be that she really loves him? Love, love, love! That blind force that is said to move the stars—why can it be so haggard, gaunt and painful a thing in the ordinary light of day? Woe is me that I am too dull to comprehend it! Like the blooded horse in _Werther_ that bites his own vein to ease his overstrained heart, I must bleed inwardly—I must suffer and endure. *CHAPTER XXIII*