man who rode life as he rode a horse, with a loose rein, a straight bit, and rowel-spurs. He had always had a headstrong tendency to hurdle with tense, savage joy across the obstacles he encountered—which were of his own making as often as not.
He had been in the habit of taking whatever sensations and emotions he could—until he had met Josephine Erskine up there in that sleepy, drab New England village where, for a generation or two, her people had endeavored to impose upon the world with a labored, pathetic, meretricious gentility.
Heretofore, woman had meant nothing to him except a charming manifestation of sex.
Then suddenly, like a sweet, swift throe, love had come to him in Josephine's brown, gold-flecked eyes and crimson mouth.
He had told her so quite simply as they walked in the rose-garden; but she had shaken her head.
"No, Roger," she had replied.
"Why not?"
"I do not love you."
She told him that she was going to become the wife, for better or for worse, of Dan Coolidge, a college chum of his—a mild, bald-headed, paunchy,
