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looked upon the separation. She would come back, he must all along have secretly believed; or at least the bare possibility had been enough to encourage his ever-ready optimism about the future. Night after night he had entered his empty house, made himself a cup of tea, spent a last hour with a book or the evening paper, and gone to bed with the comforting feeling that anything could be endured provided it might not last forever. There was even a half-ascetic sense in which he had found tolerable his enforced return to bachelorhood, and there was certainly a peace of mind that he knew her return would disturb—yet how welcome that disturbance would be! And how insidiously, behind the logic of his thoughts, he had counted on it!…He was aware of that now, as he entered his house and felt the aloneness all-enveloping. Heavily he climbed the stairs to his bedroom and began to throw a few necessary articles into a suitcase. Even that he did with an extra pang, for it reminded him of times when Livia had packed for him to attend meetings or conferences in other parts of the country; she was an expert packer as well as very particular about his clothes. And the first thing she did when he returned was to unpack and repair the ravages of his own carelessness about such things. There was that odd streak of practicality in her, running parallel to other streaks; so that she not only loved classical music but could repair the phonograph when something went wrong with it. And the garden that Winslow had admired was further evidence; it had been a dumping ground for wastepaper and old tin cans before she started work on it. Recent months without her attention had given the weeds a chance, but still her hand was in everything, and the roses seemed to have come into special bloom that week as if expecting her return. In a sort of way she had done for that patch of wasteland what George himself had tried to do for Browdley as a whole (yet would never have bothered to do for his own back garden); but of course she had done it without any civic sense, and for the simple reason that the place belonged to her. George sighed as he thought of that, recognizing motives that were so strong in her and so absent in him; but with the sigh came a wave of tolerance, as for someone who does simple natural things that are the world’s curse, doubtless, but since they cannot be changed, how pointless it is to try. Yet the world must be changed…and so George’s mind ran on, facing an old dilemma as he snapped the locks on his suitcase. All at once the house, without Livia in it, became unbearable to him; he knew he would not sleep that night, and as his train left early in the morning he might as well not even go to bed; he would take a walk, a long walk that would tire him physically as well as clarify some of the problems in his mind. He went downstairs and put on a hat, then passed through the partition doorway that separated the house from the printing office. It was the middle of the week, the slack time between issues; copy for the next one lay littered on his desk—mostly local affairs—council meetings, church activities, births, marriages, and funerals. Occasionally he wrote an editorial about some national or international event, and the one he had composed that morning faced him from the copy desk as unfathomably as if someone else had written it in another language. It read:—
These are times when the clouds of war roll back and THE SUN OF HUMAN BETTERMENT shines out to be a lamp of memory for the future. Let us hope, therefore, that AUGUST 31st, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE, the date selected as that of the official end of the Great War, will have more than a merely legal significance, that it will symbolize the actual dying out of hatreds and bitterness both at home and abroad. In this connection it is good news that the Washington Conference is soon to convene, and that the problem of world-wide DISARMAMENT will then be tackled in