York. She made him own that Ellen herself was beginning to be gayer; she
convinced him that his business was not suffering in his absence and that
he was the better from the complete rest he was having. She defied him,
to say, then, what was the matter with him, and she bitterly reproached
herself, in the event, for not having known that it was not homesickness
alone that was the trouble. When he was not going about with her, or
doing something to amuse the children, he went upon long, lonely walks,
and came home silent and fagged. He had given up smoking, and he did not
care to sit about in the office of the hotel where other old fellows
passed the time over their papers and cigars, in the heat of the glowing
grates. They looked too much like himself, with their air of
unrecognized consequence, and of personal loss in an alien environment.
He knew from their dress and bearing that they were country people, and
it wounded him in a tender place to realize that they had each left
behind him in his own town an authority and a respect which they could
not enjoy in New York. Nobody called them judge, or general, or doctor,
or squire; nobody cared who they were, or what they thought; Kenton did
not care himself; but when he missed one of them he envied him, for then
he knew that he had gone back to the soft, warm keeping of his own
neighborhood, and resumed the intelligent regard of a community he had
grown up with. There were men in New York whom Kenton had met in former
years, and whom he had sometimes fancied looking up; but he did not let
them know he was in town, and then he was hurt that they ignored him.
He kept away from places where he was likely to meet them; he thought
that it must have come to them that he was spending the winter in New
York, and as bitterly as his nature would suffer he resented the
indifference of the Ohio Society to the presence of an Ohio man of his
local distinction. He had not the habit of clubs, and when one of the
pleasant younger fellows whom he met in the hotel offered to put him up
at one, he shrank from the courtesy shyly and almost dryly. He had