"In a dryer air you might even be good, we may say, until thirty-five or forty." He shrugged his shoulders with a gesture intended to convey his sympathy but which succeeded only in expressing his personal importance, and Adams had walked out from the stuffy little ether-smelling office with a feeling curiously like that he had known as a boy when during a school game of football, he found himself suddenly thumped upon the heart.

On the doorstep he had stopped and laughed aloud, struck by the persistency with which the green bottles dominated his impressions.
After this there had come a blank of a few weeks--a blank of which he remembered nothing except that he had struggled like an entrapped beast against his fate--against his fruitless labour, his sacrificed ambition, the unavailing bitterness of his self-denial--against the world, destiny, life, death, God! But the very intensity of his rebellion had brought reaction, and it was in the succeeding apathy of spirit that he had packed his few belongings and started for the Colorado country.
Behind him he was leaving all that made life endurable in his eyes, and yet he was leaving it from some half animal instinct which caused him to preserve the mere naked strip of existence that he no longer valued.

He hated himself for going, yet he went that he might hate himself the more bitterly with each step of the journey.
The lamp on his desk flared up fitfully and as he turned to lower the wick his eyes fell on Connie's picture.

The uplifted babyish face came back to him as he had first seen it under floating cherry-colored ribbons, and his anger of the last half-hour melted and vanished utterly away.

For the sake of those few months, when the waning fire within him had leaped despairingly toward the flame of life, he knew that he could never quite put Connie from his heart--for the sake of his short romance and for the sake, too, of his child that had lived three hours.
The thin, heavily veined hand on the arm of his chair quivered for an instant, and he felt his pulses throb quickly as if from acute physical pain.