His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning.
The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb “to love”—in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets.
When he met Lillian, it reached its maturity.
From that time to this, existence had been a catching at handholds. One thing led to another and one development brought on another, and the design of his life had been the work of this secondary social man, the lover.
It had been shaped by all the penalties and responsibilities of being and having been a lover.
- Because there was Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary.
- Because there was marriage, there were children.
- Because there were children, and fervour in the blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters.
His histories, he was convinced, had no more to do with his original ego than his daughters had; they were a result of the high pressure of young manhood.
The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly so