Grover Thanet was cutting an afternoon class in Dryden with scarcely a trace of the uprushing sense of guilt that would have suffused him as a Freshman. He was a little weighed down by all he had apprehended during the last four years at Harvard, and for that reason the new green of the trees on Boston Common, framing the gilt dome of the State House, merely saddened him. His shadow self was mitigating the sadness by reminding him that he wasn't, at any rate, reacting in the obvious fashion, which was a comfort. May stirred in him feelings for which no poet with whom he was familiar had found adequate expression. Poets yearned, as he was doing, but after holding out a promise of Truth, merely offered you a maiden. The eternal feminine, he reflected, is a lightning rod, forever diverting shafts of truth to the earth.
Here was Nature creeping into town over the brick and asphalt, rejuvenating in the langorous sunlight; and here was he, in plain prose a year older than he had been last spring. His fancy turning, not lightly to thoughts of love, but gravely to thoughts of man's mortality and such, a state of mind which, according to poetical convention, should not occur till around
