It seemed that he was tongueless, homeless, and a phantom, that he belonged to nothing, was sure of nothing, and that his whole life might be nothing but an image in the dream of time.

Jack thought he had returned to his own people for only a short visit and yet, at the very instant of returning, he was filled with horror and desolation to the roots of his soul, and with a desire to escape as soon as possible. But, escape where? He was no longer sure of his own life in America, or that he had ever been there, and the thought of his return there filled him with the same doubt, horror, and confusion. And his family treated him as if he had returned to live with them forever, and was still a child. They lavished upon him the kind of tenderness and affection that people lavish on a beloved child who has returned from a long journey, and their incessant kindness, their constant efforts to amuse, interest, and delight him choked him with a sense of furious exasperation and indignity, and at the same time with an unutterable rending pity. Their eager attentions, their constant solicitude, their gleeful certainty that the childish entertainment they had prepared for him was just the thing that would enrapture him rasped his nerves to a frenzied irritation. Hot and angry words rose to his lips, words of curt refusal, angry requests that he be given an hour’s peace and privacy alone, but when he tried to speak them he could not. They were themselves like children in their eager innocence, and to answer their tender love, to repay their pitiable preparations, with sharp and angry words would have been like meeting the love of children with a blow.

Yet, their well-intentioned kindliness was maddening. On his arrival, they had all insisted on panting up the steps behind him to his room. The little room beneath the gables that he had slept in as a child had been made ready for him, but now it seemed small and cramped. The same bed he had slept in as a boy was spread tightly with clean coarse linen sheets and pillows, and covered with the fat pleated yellow comforter beneath whose warmth he had lain snugly as a child but which would now only warm his feet and legs while his shoulders froze, or cover back and neck, while feet congealed. He wondered how he could ever fit into such a bed, or find repose on the granite hardness of its two thick mattresses, or wash himself out of the little half-pint bowl and pitcher which sat tidily upon its school boy’s washstand, or dry his face upon the scrap of towel, or crouch down low enough to see to shave himself in the little square of mirror in whose mottled surface the face blurred, swelled, or contracted with a mercurial uncertainty.

But they all stood around and beamed and winked at one another gleefully as if his heart must be simply bursting with speechless rapture in face of all this luxury. Anna,—Die Grosse Anna—the servant who had worked for his family as long as he could remember waddled heavily to the bed and pranced her stiffened fingers up and down on it a dozen times, turning to look at him triumphantly as if to say: “What do you think of that, hey?”

Then Anna and his mother had made him sit down upon the bed and bounce up and down on it in an experimental manner, while all the others stood and looked on admiringly. He had obliged them dutifully, but suddenly, as he was bouncing up and down there like a fool, he had looked straight into the little mirror and seen his image, bobbing clownishly, reflected there. He saw his face, the plump, ruddy face of a well-kept man of fifty-four, the neat grey moustache, crisply trimmed, and twisted at its ends into waxed points, the clipped grey hair, neatly parted in the middle, the straight square shoulders set-off trimly with a coat that fit him beautifully, the crisp business like style of the collar and the rich dull fabric of his necktie, with the white carnation in his buttonhole. It was the figure of a man of mark and dignity, but now he saw it disfigured by a foolish simpering leer, and prancing up and down upon a bed like an idiot. It was intolerable, intolerable, and suddenly Jack began to choke with speechless rage.

But everyone stood around him goggle eyed and gap-jawed with a look of rapture, and Anna said to him with exultant satisfaction: “Ah, I tell you what! It’s good to be back in your own bed again, isn’t it, Mr. Freddy? I’ll bet you thought of it many’s the time while you were gone. Hey? I thought so!” the old fool said triumphantly, although he had said nothing. “Sleeping among all those foreigners,” the ignorant woman cried contemptuously, “in beds you don’t know who’s been in the night before! Well, Mister Freddy,” she went on in a bantering tone, “home’s not such a bad place after all, is it?” She prodded him stiffly with her thick red fingers, chuckling craftily.

Jack stared at her with an expression of apoplectic horror. This, this, Great God, to a man who had gone out and conquered the great world and who had known all the luxury and wealth that world could offer. This to a man who lived only in the best hotels when he travelled anywhere, whose room at home was a chamber twenty feet each way,—yes, by God, a room twenty feet each way in a city where every foot of space was worth its weight in gold.

Then his cousin Karl, winking at him drolly, had opened the door of the little walnut cabinet beside the bed and sharply rapped a knuckle against the chamber-pot with a mellow echoing ping. All the others had screamed with laughter, coarsely, while he sat there foolishly with a burning face. Were they mad? Was it a clownish joke that they were playing on him? But when he looked into their faces and saw the depth of love and tenderness in them he knew that it was not and the words of hot anger were silenced on his lips.

In the morning, before he was up, he heard Anna toiling heavily up the ancient winding stairs. Broad and red of face and breathing stertorously, she entered, bearing a tray with a silver pot, an enormous cup and saucer of fine thin china, a crispy flaky roll and a pot of jam. Eagerly, Jack seized the handle of the silver pot, tilted the tall frail spout into the cup and then discovered that the pot contained hot thick chocolate instead of the strong black coffee which he had had for thirty years, and must have now. But when he demanded irritably of Anna if she had no coffee, and why she had not brought it to him, she looked at him first with an expression of stupefaction, and then with alarm and reproach.

“Why, Mister Freddy,” she said chidingly, “you’ve always had your chocolate every morning of your life. Surely you haven’t gone and started drinking coffee while you were away. Why, what would your mother say if she knew you’d gone and formed the coffee-habit? You know she’d never let you have it. Ach! That’s what comes of all this gadding about and going to America,” she muttered. “It’s Mister Max who got you into this—with all his crazy Yankee ways he’s picked up over there—oranges for breakfast, if you please!—Gott!—putting all that acid in your stomach before you’ve got any solid food in you—I told your mother when you left—I said that something of this sort would happen—‘He’s not to be trusted with that child!’ I said.