for the first time upon a train--beautiful to him because it moved--and
was borne southward.

At Ann Arbor he found many new things, rules, and people, but he brushed
them aside like flies, hardly perceiving them; for there, for the first
time, he saw photographs and casts of the world's great art. The first
sight, even in a poor copy, of the two Discoboli--Diana with her swinging
knee-high tunic--the winged Victory of Samothrace--to see them first at
seventeen, without warning, without a glimmering knowledge of their
existence! And the pictures! Portfolios of Angelo, of the voluptuous
Titian, of the swaying forms of Botticelli's maidens--trite enough now
--but then!

How long he could have deceived his father as to the real nature of his
interests he did not know. Already there had been complaints of cut
lectures, reprimands, and letters from home. Evading mathematics,
science, and divinity, he read only the English and classic subjects
--because they contained beauty--and drew, copying and creating, in every
odd moment. The storm began to threaten, but it never broke; for in his
second year in college the unbelievable, the miracle, happened--his
father died. They said he had died of pneumonia, contracted while
visiting the sick in the winter blizzards, and they praised him; but
Stefan hardly listened.

One fact alone stood out amid the ugly affairs of death, so that he
regarded and remembered nothing else. He was free--and he had wings! His
father left insurance, and a couple of savings-bank accounts, but through
some fissure of vanity or carelessness in the granite of his propriety,
he left no will. The sums, amounting in all to something over three
thousand dollars, came to Stefan without conditions, guardians, or other