soon came and seated herself beside him. When the doors into the
parlour were opened, she noticed his eyes straying to an
engraving of Napoleon which hung over the piano, and made him go
and look at it. She told him it was a rare engraving, and she
showed him a portrait of her great-grandfather, who was an
officer in Napoleon’s army. To explain how this came about was a
long story.
As she talked to Claude, Mrs. Erlich discovered that his eyes
were not really pale, but only looked so because of his light
lashes. They could say a great deal when they looked squarely
into hers, and she liked what they said. She soon found out that
he was discontented; how he hated the Temple school, and why his
mother wished him to go there.
When the three who had been called in from the sidewalk took
their leave, Claude rose also. They were evidently familiars of
the house, and their careless exit, with a gay “Good-night,
everybody!” gave him no practical suggestion as to what he ought
to say or how he was to get out. Julius made things more
difficult by telling him to sit down, as it wasn’t time to go
yet. But Mrs. Erlich said it was time; he would have a long ride
out to Temple Place.
It was really very easy. She walked to the door with him and gave
him his hat, patting his arm in a final way. “You will come often
to see us. We are going to be friends.” Her forehead, with its
neat curtains of brown hair, came something below Claude’s chin,
and she peered up at him with that quaintly hopeful expression,
as if—as if even he might turn out wonderfully well! Certainly,
nobody had ever looked at him like that before.
“It’s been lovely,” he murmured to her, quite without
embarrassment, and in happy unconsciousness he turned the knob
and passed out through the glass door.
While the freight train was puffing slowly across the winter
country, leaving a black trail suspended in the still air, Claude
went over that experience minutely in his mind, as if he feared
to lose something of it on approaching home. He could remember
exactly how Mrs. Erlich and the boys had looked to him on that
first night, could repeat almost word for word the conversation
which had been so novel to him. Then he had supposed the Erlichs
were rich people, but he found out afterwards that they were
poor. The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even
those who were still in school. They merely knew how to live, he
discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on
machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.
Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else
they could do. They could not make agreeable people, either. In
so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious
indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.
Since that first visit, he had gone to the Erlichs’, not as often
as he wished, certainly, but as often as he dared. Some of the
University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like
