"Small as might be your lamp," observes the sage of Belgium, "never part with the oil that feeds it, but only give the flame that crowns it."
A poor and tenuous oil is that of my peculiar lamp, a petty flame and a murky result. But such as they are, I must guard them.
I cannot down the feeling, however, that there is some mystery, some secret reason behind this lightning-like development between Alicia and the boy. With a leaden heart I must record it that he has proven a disappointment to me. His mediocrity as a student concerns me less than his general tendency to shiftiness, his unsteady eye and his heavy drooping nether lip when he tells me that he "spent the night with the fellows at the frat house", that "a fellow’s got to associate with friends of his own age", that "he’s got to make friends", and so on. He is through his allowance four days after receiving it and repeatedly begs for more. More than once I have caught the odor of alcohol about him as he came in late at night, and only the fact that he is Laura’s boy and that I have reared him has made me condone his many offenses.
Have I been spoiling him, I wonder? Would I have condoned and tolerated as much if he were my own son? He is over a year younger than Alicia and though a handsome enough lad in his way, I fancy I see too much of Pendleton in his face for comfort. His father also was markedly good-looking when he married poor Laura. Have I, I wonder, been rearing another Pendleton?
But Alicia, the bright, the fair, the radiant, almost a woman now, with more wisdom than I ever before found in women—how came she to do such a thing as to engage herself to him? I can understand his possible infatuation. But a girl, I had always believed, learns her woman’s arts by instinct. How can she be so blind to the boy’s character and defects? Can it be that she really loves him? Love, love, love! That blind force that is said to move the stars—why can it be so haggard, gaunt and painful a thing in the ordinary light of day? Woe is me that I am too dull to comprehend it! Like the blooded horse in _Werther_ that bites his own vein to ease his overstrained heart, I must bleed inwardly—I must suffer and endure.
Since it is for you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that this vagrom journal has been written, I should deem myself derelict and insincere if I did not convey to you in every detail the sort of creature you were in middle life. If you fail to approve of your progenitor, I shall know that I have been exact, for I fail to approve of him myself.