The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both, perhaps at all of
them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and at the other faces
up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her directing and leading
the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her strong neck and the fine
firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist and a lump
came into his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.
And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
eating among strange people at Freedom Smith's table. He saw again the
tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand
in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow
the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death
through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves
on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his
hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this--this home with its
safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head of it
all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should admire and bow his
head before the romance of destiny. He thought his station, his wife, his
country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the very apex of life on the
earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that he was in some way the
master and maker of it all.
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