"Oh, come! I'm sure we've had a good enough little chat. Aren't you a bit restless yourself?" "Well, run along. I've heard his chair rolling about up there for the last half hour." 5 _COPE IS CONSIDERED FURTHER_ Randolph took the stairs to the second floor, and presently his footfalls were heard on the bare treads that led from the second to the third. At the top landing he paused and looked in through the open door of the picture-gallery. Over the varnished oak floor of this roomy apartment a middle-aged man who wore a green shade above his eyes was propelling himself in a wheeled chair. Thus did Joseph Foster cover the space where the younger and more fortunate sometimes danced, and thus did he move among works of art which, even on the brightest days, he could barely see. He knew the step. "Brought anything?" he asked. He depended on Randolph for the latest brief doings in current fiction; and usually in the background--and often long in abeyance--was something in the way of memoirs or biography, many-volumed, which could fill the empty hours either through retrospect or anticipation. "Only myself," replied the other, stepping in. Foster dextrously manoeuvred his chair toward the entrance and reached out his hand. "Well, yourself is enough. It's good to have a man about the place once in a while. Once in a while, I said. It gets tiresome, hearing all those girls slithering and chattering through the halls." He put his bony hands back on the rims of his wheels. "Where have you been all this time?" "Oh, you know I come when I can." Randolph ran his eye over the walls of the big empty room. The pictures were all in place--landscapes, figure-pieces, what not; everything as familiar as the form of words he had just employed to meet an oft repeated query implying indifference and neglect. "How is it outside? I haven't been down on the street for a month." "Oh, things are bright and pleasant enough." Through the wide window there appeared, half a mile away, the square twin towers of the University library, reminiscent of Oxford and Ely. Round them lesser towers and gables, scholastic in their gray stone, rose above the trees of the campus. Beyond all these a level line of watery blue ran for miles and provided an eventless horizon. A bright and pleasant enough sight indeed, but nothing for Joe Foster. "Well, let me by," he said, "and we'll get along to my own room." The resonant bigness of the "gallery" was far removed from the intimate and the sociable.