appear at all. We'll call ourselves the 'Hub Wine Company, Limited.'" My head was swimming, my mind buzzing with conflicting voices as we walked down King Street to inspect the premises. I ached to re-establish my position. The prospect of a quick recovery of fortune was as sweet a prize as ever tempted a green youth like myself. My partner, too, this time would be a "gentleman," a fellow my father might have invited to dine and play tennis; it was my appalling ignorance of life that gave to his two years' seniority some imagined quality of being a man much older than myself, and one who knew what he was about.
The character of the proposed enterprise, of course, had no effect at all upon the judgment. To be known as a successful hotel proprietor was a legitimate ambition. My father's stern judgment of philanthropists who preached temperance while owning distilleries or holding brewery shares--I knew it word for word--was quite forgotten. Only the little personal point of view was present: "I've been an ass. I must make good. Here's a chance, a certainty, of getting money. I must take it. It's my Karma."
We strode down King Street together, past the corner of Yonge Street, below the windows of the hated Temperance and General Life Assurance Company where I had licked stamps, and on towards the Hub Hotel. The Toronto air was fresh and sweet, the lake lay blue beyond, the sunlight sparkled. Something exhilarating and optimistic in the atmosphere gave thought a happy and sanguine twist. It was a day of Indian summer, a faint perfume of far-distant forest fires adding a pleasant touch to the familiar smell of the cedar-wood sidewalks. A mood of freedom, liberty, great spaces, fine big enterprises in a free country where everything was possible, of opportunities seized and waves of fortune taken on their crest--I remember this mood as sharply still, and the scent of a wood-fire or a cedar pencil recalls it as vividly still, as though I had experienced it last
week.
