In all those busy, successful years there had been nothing
so good as this hour of wild light-heartedness. This feeling was the
only happiness that was real to him, and such hours were the only ones
in which he could feel his own continuous identity--feel the boy he had
been in the rough days of the old West, feel the youth who had worked
his way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and gone to study in Paris
without a dollar in his pocket. The man who sat in his offices in Boston
was only a powerful machine. Under the activities of that machine the
person who, in such moments as this, he felt to be himself, was fading
and dying. He remembered how, when he was a little boy and his father
called him in the morning, he used to leap from his bed into the full
consciousness of himself. That consciousness was Life itself. Whatever
took its place, action, reflection, the power of concentrated thought,
were only functions of a mechanism useful to society; things that could
be bought in the market. There was only one thing that had an absolute
value for each individual, and it was just that original impulse, that
internal heat, that feeling of one's self in one's own breast.
When Alexander walked back to his hotel, the red and green lights were
blinking along the docks on the farther shore, and the soft white stars
were shining in the wide sky above the river.
The next night, and the next, Alexander repeated this same foolish
performance. It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to find,
and he got no farther than the Temple gardens and the Embankment.
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