He remembered the last Christmas house-party at the Fargos' place on the St. Lawrence. Its habitués irreverently dubbed this "The Shack", but it was the nursling of folk who took their camping luxuriously, in a palatial structure which, though built, as to its exterior, of logs, was equipped within with Turkish bath, billiard-room and the most indefatigable chef west of St. Petersburg. The evening before his host's swift motor had hooted him off to the station, as its wide hall exhaled the bouquet of after-dinner cigars, he had looked at her standing in the wide doorway, a rare exquisite creature--her face fore-shortened and touched to a borrowed tenderness by the flickering glow of the burning logs in the room behind--the perfect flower, he had thought, of the civilization in which he lived.
John Valiant looked down at the bulldog squatted on the floor, his eyes shining in the dimness. A little hot ripple had run over him. "Not on your life, Chum!" he said. "No shameless barter! There must be other things besides money and social position in this doddering old world, after all!"
The dog whined with delight at the voice and jumped up to lick the strong tense hand held down to him. "Do you know, old chap," his master continued, "I've been handing myself a collection of cold marble truths in the last few weeks? I've been the prize dolt of the whole show, and you ought to have thrown me over long ago. You've probably realized it all along, but it has never dawned on me until lately. I've worn the blue ribbon so long I'd come to think it was a decoration. All my life I've been just another of those well-meaning, brainless young idiots who have never done a blessed thing that's the slightest value to anybody else. Well, Chum, we're through. We're going to begin doing something for ourselves, if it's only raising cabbages! And we're going to stand it without any baby-aching--the nurse never held our noses when we took our castor-oil!"
It was folded down, that old bright page. _Finis_ had been written to the rose-colored chapter. And even as he told himself, he was conscious of a new rugged something that had been slowly dawning within him, a sense of courage, even of zest, and a furious hatred of the self-pity that had wrenched him even for a moment.