The scene of a sordid and toil-hardened people finding solace in music brought home to Hartley how much he himself had been missing from life; how narrow, of late, his days had grown to be. The chance to wring out of existence its richest wine was before him, had been thrust upon him, and he had neglected it. As he walked wearily home through the cold night air he determined, with a sudden passionate clutching of his hands, to take what was his due, to grasp at what lay before him in life. He was tired of all empty and enslaving work; the tide had met its turn. A Nietzsche-like madness to throw open his man's arsenal of instinct, a longing to fling his weight against every iron law that seemed, at the moment, to choke and overrun and stultify life, filled him with a sense of tingling opposition. To battle Byronic-like against convention, to ride the whirlwind like the old gods of life, but to fight always, and for all things--that seemed to him life, and the best of life. And in something that was almost delirium, in one white flash of inspirational, subliminal clearness, came to him the first ideas of his poem on War--a poem which he worked out feverishly, yet not unhappily, during the next few days of culminating weariness and illness, little dreaming of the part it was soon to play in lives other than his own. CHAPTER XVI REINFORCEMENTS And though idle as scholars we stand, Where they pilfer and swarm in our home, The honey of power waits the hand But daring to pilfer the comb. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Siren City." A cynic, is he? Then take all he says with an ounce of civet and a grain of salt.--"The Silver Poppy." To Cordelia over her coffee-cup Mrs. Spaulding confided a remarkable example of her husband's perversity. Their talk had drifted round to this point because of a scene, of which Cordelia had been an unfortunate witness, the night before. A flurry of unexpected bills had come in at the first of the month. After looking them over, the alert and ever-keen business instinct of Alfred Spaulding had at first gently and then quite vigorously rebelled against what seemed to him nothing but wanton extravagance. A florist's bill in particular--it was for eight hundred dollars--had startled him into indignation, though Mrs. Spaulding remained heroically silent as to the fact that the great bulk of that bill had been due to the unconsidered visits of Cordelia, and had been quite as much a surprise to her as it now was to her husband.