The Family
the ends of his military eyebrows with her thumb
and middle finger. “Why is it, Godfrey? I can’t
see any change in your face, though I watch you so
closely. It’s in your mind, in your mood. Some¬
thing has come over you. Is it merely that you
know too much, I wonder? Too much to be happy?
You were always the wisest person in the world.
What is it, can’t you tell me?”
“I can’t altogether tell myself, Lillian. It’s not wholly a matter of the calendar. It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again—and I don’t really wish to go back. The way would be too long and too fatiguing. Perhaps, for a home-staying man, I’ve lived pretty hard. I wasn’t willing to slight anything—you, or my desk, or my students. And now I seem to be tremendously tired. One pays, coming or going. A man has got only just so much in him; when it’s gone he slumps. Even the first Napoleon did.” They both laughed. That was an old joke—the Professor’s darkest secret. At the font he had been christened Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter. There had always been a Napoleon in the family, since a remote grandfather got his discharge from the Grande Armee. Godfrey had abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters didn’t know what it had been originally.
“I think, you know,” he told his wife as he rose
—163—
