The wisdom that grew out of his suffering opened pitfalls for his wandering feet.

The wildness of men and the passion of women somehow waited with incredible fatality for that hour when chance led him into their lives.

He had toiled, he had given, he had fought, he had sacrificed, he had killed, he had endured for the human nature which in his savage youth he had betrayed.

Yet out of his supreme and endless striving to undo, to make reparation, to give his life, to find God, had come, it seemed to Wade in his abasement, only a driving torment.
But though his thought and emotion fluctuated, varying, wandering, his memory held a fixed and changeless picture of a woman, fair and sweet, with eyes of nameless blue, and face as white as a flower.
"Baby would have been--let's see--'most nineteen years old now--if she'd lived," he said.

"A big girl, I reckon, like her mother....