For the next few years there was hardly a shadow on the smiling surface of our prosperity. Society had received us in spite of my father, in spite even of my brother; and the day that had made me Sally's husband had given me a place, if an alien one, in the circle in which she moved. I was there at last, and it was neither her fault nor mine if I carried with me into that stained-glass atmosphere something of the consciousness of the market boy, who seemed to stand always at the kitchen door. Curiously enough there were instants even now when I felt vaguely aware that, however large I might appear to loom in my physical presence, a part of me was, in reality, still on the outside, hovering uncertainly beyond the threshold. There were things I had never learned--would never learn; things that belonged so naturally to the people with whom I lived that they seemed only aware of them when brought face to face with the fact of their absence. The lightness of life taught me nothing except that I was built in mind and in body upon a heavier plan. At the dinner-table, when the airy talk floated about me, I felt again and again that the sparkling trivialities settled like thistledown upon the solid mass I presented, and remained there because of my native inability to waft them back. It was still as impossible for me to entertain pretty girls in pink tarlatan as it had been on the night of my first party; and the memory of that disastrous social episode stung me at times when I stood large and awkward before a gay and animated maiden, or sat wedged in, like a massive block, between two patient and sleepy mothers. These people were all Sally's friends, not mine, and it was for her sake, I never forgot for a minute, that they had accepted me. With just such pleasant condescension they would still have accepted me, I knew, if I had, in truth, entered their company with my basket of potatoes or carrots on my arm. One alone held out unwaveringly through the years; for Miss Mitty, shut with her pride and her portraits in the old grey house, obstinately closed her big mahogany doors against our repeated friendly advances. Sometimes at dusk, as I passed on the crooked pavement under the two great sycamores, I would glance up at the windows, where the red firelight glimmered on the small square panes, and fancy that I saw her long, oval face gazing down on me from between the parted lace curtains. But she made no sign of forgiveness, and when Sally went to see her, as she did sometimes, the old lady received her formally in the drawing-room, with a distant and stately manner. She, who was the mixture of a Bland and a Fairfax, sat enthroned upon her traditions, while we of the common, outside world walked by under the silvery boughs of her sycamores.