When Charles-Norton reached the street, a narrow side-street in which like a glacier the ice of the whole winter was still heaped, a whiff of soft air, perfumed with a suspicion of spring, struck him gently in the face. He drew it in deep within his lungs, and exhaled it in a long sigh. And then he stopped abruptly, and was standing very still, listening; listening to this sigh, to the echo of it still within his consciousness, as if testing it. He shook his head disapprovingly. "Gee," he said; "hope I'm not getting discontented again!"

As if in response, another gentle gust came down the street; he caught it as it came and drew it deep within him. His chest swelled, his eyes brightened. And then suddenly he tensed; he rose a-tip-toe, heels close together, his head went back; his hands stole to his armpits, and his elbows began to wave up and down.

"Good Lord!" he ejaculated, catching himself up sharply; "here goes that darned flapping again!"

He looked up and down the street, assuming a negligent attitude. His forehead was red. "Nope," he said. No one had seen him. "She saw me this morning," he thought, and the red of his forehead came down to his cheeks. "It's getting worse; a regular habit. Let me see—two, three; it began three weeks ago——"

He shook his head perplexedly and resumed his way toward the Elevated station.

"It may have been all right when I was a boy," he said to himself as he swung along. "But now!

"Let me see. I was fourteen, the first time."

A picture rose before his eyes. It had happened in a far western land—a land that now remained in his memory as a pool of gold beneath a turquoise sky. He was lying there in the wild oats, upon his back, and above him in the sky a hawk circled free. He watched it long thus, relaxed in a sort of droning somnolence; then suddenly, to a particularly fine spiral of the bird in the air, something like a convulsion had shot through his body, and he had found himself erect, head back and chest forward, his arms flapping——

"'Twas the day before I ran away with the circus," he soliloquized in the midst of the throng milling up the Elevated station stairs. "And later, when I had come back from the circus, I took that long bum on brake-beams. And when I had come back from that, a little later I went off in the forecastle of the 'Tropic Bird' to Tahiti. And each time that flapping business came first. Every time I've done something wild and foolish, I've flapped first like this. First I'd flap, then I'd feel like doing something, I wouldn't know what, then I'd do it—and it would be something foolish——"

The train slid up to the platform; he boarded it and by some miracle found on the bench behind the door of the last car a narrow space in which he squeezed himself.

"I'll have to stop it," he said decisively.

He drew from his breast pocket a note-book and a pencil. Opening the book out across his knees, he bent over it and began to draw. He worked with concentration, but seemingly with little result, for he drew only detached lines. There were spirals, circles, ovals, parabolas; lines that curved upward, broke, and curved again downward, like gothic arches; lines that curved in gentle languor; lines that breathed like the undulations of a peaceful sea; and then just zipping, swift, straight lines that shot up to the upper end of the paper and seemed to continue invisibly toward an altitudinous nowhere. This is all he drew, and yet as he worked there was in his face the set of stubborn purpose, and in his eyes the glow of aspiration. He tried to make each line beautiful and firm and swift and pure. When he succeeded, he felt within him the bubbling of a sweet contentment. This would be followed by dissatisfaction, renewed yearning—and he would begin again.

"By Jove!" he muttered in sudden consternation, straightening away from the book.

And then, "They began at the same time."

And a moment later, "And they are the same."

It had struck him abruptly that the strange urge which made him draw lines was like that which at times convulsed his body into that mysterious manifestation which, for the want of a better word, he called his "flapping." The two things had begun together, and they were of the same essence. The impulse which possessed him as he tried for beauty with paper and pencil was the same which swelled his lungs and his heart, which made him rise a-tip-toe and wave his arms. It came from a feeling of subtle and inexplicable dissatisfaction; it was made of a vague and vast longing. It was the same which, when a boy, had sent him to the brake-beam, the circus, and the sea; it was to be distrusted.

He slammed the book shut and put it in his pocket. "No more of this," he said.

A certain confidence, though, came gradually into his eyes. "After all, these things do not mean much now," he thought. "I was a boy, then, and unhappy. I am a man, now, and happy."

His mind idled back over the two years since his marriage, over the warm coziness of the last two years. What a wife, this little Dolly! What a little swaddler! She wrapped up everything as in cotton—all the asperities of Life, and the asperities of Charles-Norton himself also. Gone for the two years had been the old uncertainties, the vague tumults, the blind surges. Yes, he was happy.

This word happy, for the second time on his tongue, set him a-dreaming. A picture came floating before his eyes. And curiously enough, it was not of Dolly, nor of the padded little flat——

It was of a boy, a boy in blue overalls and cotton shirt, lying on his back amid the wild oats of a golden land, his eyes to the sky, watching up there the free wide circle of a hawk——

"Soy, Mister, wot the deuce do you think you're doing?" shouted a husky and protesting voice in his ear.

And Charles-Norton came back precipitously to the present. By his side a pale youth was squirming indignantly. Charles-Norton's elbow was in the youth's ribs, and his elbow was still stirring with the last oscillation of the movement that had agitated it. "Soy," cried the youth in disgust; "d'yous think you's a chicken?"

"I beg your pardon," said Charles-Norton, in an agony of humility; "I beg your pardon."

But the youth refused to be mollified. Though he said nothing more, he kept upon Charles-Norton the snarl of his pale face and at regular intervals rubbed his ribs as though they pained him exceedingly. Charles-Norton was glad to reach his station.

That morning, in his glass cage, he muddled his columns several times. He was far from an admirable accountant at his best; but this day he was what he termed "the limit." Totals fled him like birds, with a whir of wings. A sun-gleam hypnotized him once, for he did not know how long; and his nose, a little later, followed for several gymnastic minutes the flutter of a white moth.

At lunch, in Konrad's Bakery, he found himself seated, by a singular chance, next to the very same youth whose ribs he had crushed on the Elevated a few hours before. The young man was in more amiable mood. He grinned. "Don't you flap again and spill me coffee, Mr. Chicken," he said, with delicate persiflage.

"I won't," said Charles-Norton. "I'll buy you another cup if I do."

"Got a dollar?" asked the youth, irrelevantly. His thin, pale nose quivered a bit.

"I don't know," said Charles-Norton, hesitatingly. Dollars were big in his budget. "Why?"

The youth drew from a pocket a yellow cardboard. "Got a lottery ticket I want to sell," he said easily. "Little Texas. Hundred Thousand first prize and lots of other prizes. Got to sell it to pay me lunch. Played the ponies yesterday."

Charles-Norton eyed the ticket doubtfully. Usually, he would not have considered the matter a moment. But somehow the incident of the morning had placed him at a disadvantage toward the pale youth. Vaguely he was moved by a wish to regain by some act the respect of this exacting person. He bought the ticket.

"Maybe this was the foolish act that all this flapping announced," he said to himself, once outside, in answer to a not uncertain prick of his marital conscience. "Buying this ticket is like buying a lightning-rod; it may draw off the lightning!"

But his singular malady, during the afternoon, did not disappear. It waxed, in fact; it passed the borders of the spiritual and assumed physical symptoms. "Dolly," he said, when he was again within the warmth of the little flat in the evening; "Dolly, would you mind looking at my shoulders after a while?"

"Why, of course, I'll look at them, Goosie," answered Dolly, immediately alert at the possibility of doing something for the big man; "what is the matter with your shoulders, Goosie?"

"I don't know," he said, sinking a bit wearily into the Morris chair. "They pain; just like rheumatism or growing pain. And they tickle too, Dolly; they tickle all the time." He crossed his arms, raising a hand to each shoulder, and rubbed them with a shiver of delight. "It's a nuisance," he said.

"Well, we'll see about it right away," said Dolly. "Right after supper." Her eyes grew big with concern. "You may have caught cold. Come on, dear," she said, brightening; "I've the dandiest, deliciousest soup, right out of the Ladies' Home Journal, for you!"