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He wiped his brow with his silk handkerchief. It was impossible for him not to think of himself on July fifth; also July sixth, seventh, eighth.

“What a lot of dynamite there is in one little word!” he muttered to himself. “What a difference there is between, ‘Saunders Rook, the man who is going to commit suicide on the Fourth of July,’ and ‘Saunders Rook, the man who was going to commit suicide on the Fourth of July!’ One is romantic, promising, glorious; the other,—ugh!—the other is the epitaph of a weakling, a turncoat, a failure.”

He stopped before a picture-store and moodily gazed at a seascape in the window. He recalled that some sage has said, “Any man can make a reputation; it takes a real man to keep one.” He had a reputation, he reflected. He derived pleasure from that fact even now. It was more than he had dared hope for. Three weeks before it had seemed that he had been cast for a minor rôle in life, the voice of the mob offstage; almost overnight he had attained stardom. He, who had never expected to have a line to speak, had strutted and postured and declaimed in the center of the stage and heard the sweet music of applause. Today he was a hero; tomorrow he would be a joke. The day was warm, but he shuddered.