he could speak even of the family past, into which by degrees he began to
fit the real man in place of that bucolic abstraction which had walked the
fields of fancy. He had never dared to actuate the "hired man," his
father, on a basis of fact. He knew the speech and manners of the class
from which he came,--knew men of that class, and talked with them every
summer at Stone Ridge; but he had brooded so deeply over the tragic and
sentimental side of his father's fate as to have lost sight of the fact
that he was a man.

Reality has its own convincing charm, not inconsistent with plainness or
even with commonness. To know it is to lose one's taste for toys of the
imagination. Paul, at last, could look back almost with, a sense of humor
at the doll-like progenitor he had played with so long. But when it came
to placing the real man, Adam Bogardus, beside that real woman, once his
wife, their son could but own with awe that there is mercy in extinction,
after all; in the chance, however it may come to us, for slipping off
those cruel disguises that life weaves around us.

In the strange, wakeful nights, full of starvation dreams, he saw his
mother as she would look on state occasions in the hostess's place at her
luxurious table; the odor of flowers, the smell of meats and wines,
tantalized and sickened him. Christine would come in her dancing frocks,
always laughing, greedy in her mirth; but Moya, face to face, he could
never see. It was torture to feel her near him, a disembodied embrace.
Passionate panegyrics and hopeless adjurations he would pour out to that
hovering loveliness just beyond his reach. The agony of frustration would
waken him, if indeed it were sleep that dissolved his consciousness, and
he would be irritable if spoken to.

The packer broke in, one morning, on these unnerving dreams. "You wouldn't