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In another year there would be nothing left of those great cedars that were ancient when the first white man crossed the Rockies, nothing but a few hundred stumps. With the coming of midwinter a somnolent period seemed also to occur in Hollister's affairs. One day succeeded another in placid routine. The work went on with clock-like precision.
"It's about a man who wrecked his life by systematically undermining his own illusions about life," he answered one day Hollister's curious inquiry as to what the new book was about, "and of how finally a very assiduously cultivated illusion made him quite happy at last. Sound interesting?" "How could he deliberately cultivate an illusion?" Doris asked.
"I don't think I ever saw a handsomer man. Now, if he had looked at me " The sentence was never finished, for at this crucial moment I dropped a grammar.... I had heard enough, however, to excite my curiosity to the highest pitch. And that evening, when I came in at five o'clock to study, I asked my mother what had become of Gene Hollister's aunt.
My father couldn't intend to do that, just because my monthly reports hadn't always been what he thought they ought to be! Gene Hollister's were no better, if as good, and he was going to Princeton.
If, as I watched him there with a newborn pride and loyalty, I had paused to reconstruct the idea that the mention of his name would formerly have evoked, I suppose I should have found him falling short of my notion of a gentleman; it had been my father's opinion; but Mr. Watling's marriage to Gene Hollister's aunt had given him a standing with us at home.
Ethel would have never become a Camp Fire Girl excepting for her great-aunt Susan. Susan Carpenter was her Grandmother Hollister's only sister, living in Akron, Ohio. Her family consisted of Mr. Thomas Harper and herself.
And yet what else can be the matter?" Try as he might, Willis could not solve the problem. It was utterly past solution as far as he was concerned. "I'll find out, and I'll find out like a brave man," he said, after racking his brains for an hour or two in a vain endeavor to get at the cause of Miss Hollister's cut. "I'll call upon her to-night and ask her."
"We decided that they have more good," she said. Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, "Really!" she said. All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their tools. Paul Hollister's face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment later he caught the faraway five-o'clock whistles calling from the city.
In the course of the evening somebody suggested mind-reading as a pastime, and Lansing, who had some powers, or supposed powers, in that direction, although he laughed at them himself, experimented in turn with the ladies. He failed with nearly every subject until it came Mary Hollister's turn.
But there have been times you know, don't you, Bob? when it has been simply hell, when I struggled in a black abyss, afraid to die and yet full of bitter protest against the futility of living." The tears stood in her eyes and she reached for Hollister's hand, and squeezed it tightly between her own.
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