my shame was very real. In my heart was a secret wish to live in the backwoods for evermore, a broken man, feeding on lost illusions and vanished dreams. The light-*hearted plans that Louis B---- and Kay so airily discussed I could not understand. My heart sank each time I recognized my father's handwriting on an envelope. I felt a kind of final misery that only my belief in Karma mitigated.
This mood of exaggerated intensity soon passed, of course, but for a time life was very bitter. It was hard at first to "accept" these fruits of former lives, this harvest of misfortune whose seeds I assuredly had sown myself long, long ago. The "detachment" I was trying to learn, with its attitude of somehow being "indifferent to the fruits of action," was not acquired in a day.
Yet it interests me now to look back down the vista of thirty years, and to realize that this first test of my line of thought--whether it was a pretty fancy merely, or whether a real conviction--did not find me wanting. It was, I found, a genuine belief; neither then, nor in the severer tests that followed, did it ever fail me for a single moment. I understood, similarly, how my father's faith, equally sincere though in such different guise to mine, could give him strength and comfort, no matter what life might bring....
As our train went northwards through the hinterland towards Gravenhurst and the enchanted island where we were to spend five months of a fairyland existence, I grasped that a chapter of my life was closed, and a new one opening. The mind looked back, of course. Toronto, whose Indian name means Place of Meeting, I saw only once or twice again. I never stayed there. At the end of our happy island-life, we rushed through it on our way to fresh adventures in New York, Kay hiding his face in an overcoat lest some creditor catch a glimpse of him and serve a blue writ before the train's few minutes' pause in the station ended. The following winter, indeed, this happened, though in a theatre and not in a railway
carriage. The travelling company, of which he formed
