THE GAY COCKADE
but fundamentally of the same type. Neither of them had made him feel that he might be more than he was. They had always shrunk him to their own somewhat small patterns.
Jane's philosophy came to him therefore like a long-withheld stimulant. "You might be President of the United States."
When Henry or Atwood or Tommy had said it to him he had laughed. When Jane said it he did not laugh.
V
And so it came about that one day he rose and went to his father. And he said: "Dad, will you kill the fatted calf?"
His father lived in a great Tudor house which gave the effect of age but was not old. It had a minstrels' gallery, a big hall and a little hall, mullioned windows and all the rest of it. It had been built because of a whim of his wife's. But O-liver's father in the ten years he had lived in it had learned to love it. But more than he loved the house he loved the hills that sloped away from it, the mountains that towered above it, the sea that lay at the foot of the cliff.
"It is God's country," he would say with long-drawn breath. He had been born and bred in this golden West. All the passion he might have given
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