IV.
All through that summer he often walked abroad in the evenings. He liked to stand for a minute in front of the house where he was born, and then in front of another house where he had been a little boy. On his customary routes there were other sharp landmarks of the 90’s, converted habitats of gayeties that no longer existed—the shell of Jansen’s Livery Stables and the old Nushka Rink, where every winter his father had curled on the well-kept ice.
“And it’s a darn pity,” he would mutter. “A darn pity.”
He had a tendency, too, to walk past the lights of a certain drug store, because it seemed to him that it had contained the seed of another and nearer branch of the past. Once he went in, and inquiring casually about the blonde clerk, found that she had married and departed several mo
