The first days of spring contrasted strongly with Marley’s mood. Because of some mysterious similarity in the two seasons he found the melancholy suggestion of fall in this spring, just as, with his high-flown hopes, he had found some of the joyous suggestion of spring in the autumn before. But as failure followed failure, he began to feel more and more an alien in Macochee; he had a sense of exile among his own kind, he was tortured by the thought that here, in a world where each man had some work to do and where, as it seemed, all men had suddenly grown happy in that work, there was no work for him to do.

He was young, healthy, and ambitious; he had given years to what he had been taught was a necessary preparation, and then suddenly, just as he felt himself ready for life, he found that there was no place in life for him. As he went about seeking employment there was borne in on him a sense of criticism and opposition, and he was depressed and humiliated. By the end of the winter he disliked showing himself anywhere; he no longer stopped in the McBriar House of an afternoon to watch Lawrence and Halliday at the billiards they played so well; he thought he detected a coolness in Lawrence’s treatment of him. He felt, or imagined, this coolness in everybody’s attitude now, and finally began to suspect it in the Blairs.

“What’s the matter?” asked Powell, one morning. “You ain’t sick, are you?”

Marley shook his head.

“Well, something ails you. I can see that.” He waited for Marley to speak. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No,” said Marley, “thank you. I’ve just been feeling a little bit blue, that’s all.”

“What about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m kind o’ discouraged. It seems to me that I’m wasting time; I’m not making any headway and then everybody in town is—”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Powell, divining the trouble at once. “They’ve had me on the gridiron for about forty years, and they never get tired of giving it a twist. It doesn’t bother me much any more, and I don’t see why you should let it bother you, especially as all they say about you is a damn lie.”

The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself in an impulse of sympathy for Powell, but he could not put his sympathy before Powell in the way he would like and his mind soon returned to himself.

“I’ve got to do something,” he said. “I wish I knew what.”

“Well,” said Powell, “you know what I’ve always told you. I know what I’d do if I were your age. Of course—”

Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking out the window again, lost in introspection.

Powell’s reiteration of his old advice expressed the very thought that had been nebulous in Marley’s mind for days, and while he was conscious of it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to prevent it from positing itself. But now that Powell had voiced it for him, he could escape it no longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went about all the day with this fear appalling him; more and more under its perverse influence he felt himself an alien, and the people he met in the street seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons whom he had never known. They came upon him as ghosts, or if they did something to prove their reality, he seemed to be some ghost himself.

In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia; she said that she was going that evening with George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House. She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her mother, and especially her father, had urged her to go; arguing that she now went out so seldom that it must do her good, and besides, they had urged her so often that she felt it to be her duty in this instance; she had held out as long as she could, and then had yielded.

Marley tried to look upon the note reasonably; he could see the influence that had compelled Lavinia to go, and he knew he had no right to blame her, and yet, try as he would, he could not escape a feeling of bitterness. When he went home at evening his mother instantly noticed his depression, and implored him for the reason. He did not answer for a while, that is, it seemed a while to Mrs. Marley, but at last he said:

“Mother, I’ve got to leave.”

“Leave?” she repeated, pronouncing the word in a hollow note of fear.

“Yes, leave.”

“But what for?”

“Well, you know I’m no good; I’m making no headway; there’s no place for me here in Macochee; I’ve got to get out into the world and make a place for myself, somewhere.”

“But where?”

“I don’t know—anywhere.”

Marley moved his hand in a wide gesture that included the whole world, and yet was without hope of conquest.

“But you must have some plans—some idea—”

“Well, I’ve thought of going to Cincinnati; maybe to Chicago.”

“But what will you do?” Mrs. Marley looked at him with pain and alarm.

“Do!” he said, his voice rising almost angrily. “Why, anything I can get to do. Anything, anything, sweeping streets, digging ditches, anything!”

Mrs. Marley looked at her son, sitting there before her with his head bowed in his hands. In her own face were reflected the pain and trouble that darkened his, and yet she felt herself helpless; she vaguely realized that he was engaged in a battle that he must after all fight alone; she could not help him, though she wished that she knew how to impart to him the faith she had that he would win the battle, somehow, in the end.

“Poor boy!” she said at length, rising; “you are not yourself just now. Think it all over and talk to your father about it.”

It was the first evening in months that Marley had not spent with Lavinia, and his existence being now so bound up with hers, he found that he could not spend the evening as the other young men in town spent their evenings. However, he went down to the McBriar House and there a long bill hanging on the wall instantly struck his eye. The bill announced an excursion to Chicago. It took away his breath; he stood transfixed before it, fascinated and yet repelled; he read it through a dozen times. The cheerful way in which the railroad held out this trip intensified his own gloom; he wondered how he might escape, but there was no way; it was plainly the revelation of his destiny, prophetic, absolute, final, and he bowed before it as to a decree of fate; he knew now that he must go.

As he went home, as he walked the dark streets in the air that was full of the balm of the coming spring, he felt as one to whom a great sorrow had come. He thought of leaving Macochee, of leaving his father and mother, and then, more than all, of leaving Lavinia, and his throat ached with the pain of parting that, even now, before any of his plans had been made, began to assail him. His plans were nothing now; they had become the merest details; the great decision had been reached, not by him, but for him; the destiny toward which all the lines of his existence for months had been converging, was on him, the moment had arrived, and he had a sense of being the mute and helpless victim of forces that were playing with him, hurrying him along to a future as dark as the moonless night above him.

He told his father of the excursion, though he gave him no notion of it as an expression of his fate, and he was all the more distressed at the calm way in which his father acquiesced in what he put before him as a decision he would have liked to have appear as less final. His father in his mildness could not object to his trying, and he would provide the money for the experiment. It gave Marley a moment’s respite to have his father speak of it as an experiment, for that included the possibility of failure, and hence of his return home, but this meager consolation was immediately dissipated in the surer sense he felt that this was the end—the end of Macochee, the end of home, and the beginning of a new life.