Half
hidden in the green of fir and oak and maple, slumberous with
midsummer heat, it lay when he left it. Thickly powdered with the
fine white dust of its own unpaven streets, dust that sent the
inhabitants chronically sneezing and weeping and red-eyed about town,
or sent them north to the lakes for exemption, dust that hung
impalpably suspended in the still air and turned the sunsets to
things of glorious rose and red and gold though there wasn't a single
cloud or streamer in the sky to catch the light, dust that lay upon
lawns and walks and houses in deep gray accumulation ... precisely
as if these were objects put away and never used and not disturbed
until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that
accompanies disuse. Indeed, he felt that way about Tawnleytown, as
if it were a closed room of the world, a room of long ago, unused now,
unimportant, forgotten.
So unquestionably he was ready enough to go. He had all the fine and
far-flung dreams of surging youth. He peopled the world with his
fancies, built castles on every high hill. He felt the urge of
ambition fiercely stirring within him, latent power pulsing through
him. What would you? Wasn't he young and in love?
For there had been, you must know, a good deal between them.
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