For a fortnight Grover experienced a sort of sombre happiness in picking up the threads of his abandoned life. It was diverting and educative to visit the houses that had oppressed him as a youth and to contrast his present reaction with the earlier. There was much that he had outgrown forever, but also surprisingly much that he could still do with. People are the same the world over, he concluded, on discovering rebel tendencies in the bosom of such rooted New Englanders as the Daggetts and Sipes. What had really annoyed him about Americans, as he viewed them from his artistic perch, was not their want of human understanding, but their ignorance and their bland indifference to aspects of life that happened to engross him. If one were willing to make allowance for that enormous gap, and in his present mood he was willing, there were many points at which one could meet them.
Despite which he knew, as he stood before the white-pillared town hall of Aldergrove, he knew from the look in the eyes of his fellow-citizens, that his silhouette against that dignified old edifice was incongruously alien. He had left more than his trunks behind him when he had sailed for America; he had left a part of him which he still felt to be the major part.
Rhoda, able as ever to read him by signs, had come home from her office one evening and found him at the piano, playing in a manner which prompted her to say, when she had laid aside her hat and installed
