The Nest Builder by Hale, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson

Byrd was silent.

"Also," continued the Scot, quite unrebuffed, "it would be interesting to know what exactly ye mean when ye call yoursel' a Bohemian. Would ye be referring to your tastes, now, or to your nationality?"

His hand trembling with nervous temper, Byrd laid down his napkin, and rose with an attempt at dignity somewhat marred by the viselike clutch of the swivel chair upon his emerging legs.

"My mother was a Bohemian, my father an American. Neither, happily, was Scotch," said he, almost stammering in his attempt to control his extreme distaste of his surroundings--and hurried out of the saloon, leaving a table of dropped jaws behind him.

"The young man is nairvous," contentedly boomed the Scot. "I'm thinking he'll be feeling the sea already. What kind of a place would Bohemia, be, d'ye think, to have a mother from?" turning to the clergyman.

"A place of evil life, seemingly," answered that worthy in his high- pitched, carrying voice. "I shall certainly ask to have my seat changed. I cannot subject myself for the voyage to the neighborhood of a man of profane speech."

The table nodded approval.

"A traitor to his country, too," said a pursy little man opposite, snapping his jaws shut like a turtle.

A bony New England spinster turned deprecating eyes to him. "My," she whispered shrilly, "he was just terrible, wasn't he? But so handsome! I can't help but think it was more seasickness with him than an evil nature."

Meanwhile the subject of discussion, who would have writhed far more at the spinster's palliation of his offense than at the men's disdain, lay in his tiny cabin, a prey to an attack of that nervous misery which overtakes an artist out of his element as surely and speedily as air suffocates a fish.

Stefan Byrd's table companions were guilty in his eyes of the one unforgivable sin--they were ugly. Ugly alike in feature, dress, and bearing, they had for him absolutely no excuse for existence. He felt no bond of common humanity with them. In his lexicon what was not beautiful was not human, and he recognized no more obligation of good fellowship toward them than he would have done toward a company of ground-hogs. He lay back, one fine and nervous hand across his eyes, trying to obliterate the image of the saloon and all its inmates by conjuring up a vision of the world he had left, the winsome young cosmopolitan Paris of the art student. The streets, the cafes, the studios; his few men, his many women, friends--Adolph Jensen, the kindly Swede who loved him; Louise, Nanette, the little Polish Yanina, who had said they loved him; the slanting-glanced Turkish students, the grave Syrians, the democratic un-British Londoners--the smell, the glamour of Paris, returned to him with the nostalgia of despair.

These he had left. To what did he go?

II

In his shivering, creaking little cabin, suspended, as it were, by the uncertain waters between two lives, Byrd forced himself to remember the America he had known before his Paris days. He recalled his birthplace --a village in upper Michigan--and his mental eyes bored across the pictures that came with the running speed of a cinematograph to his memory.