He began to turn his eyes impatiently toward the office door. Martha had left him in charge, promising to return in an hour, but he knew that her hours were frequently afternoons as she cavorted around the city, throwing out miniature whirlwinds of appeals for money and attention. In a corner of the office stood a huge photograph of her latest god--a middle-aged, hawk-faced lecturer from England--that fertile land from whence all lecturers flow--a man who had recently startled the city by speaking on Oscar Wilde, dressed in a black robe and standing in a chamber dimly disgraced by candles, incense, and muslin poppies. The theatrically savage features of this man rested beneath a framed letter from a prominent writer--one of those abortions in which the great man tells a small magazine that he earnestly hopes that it will amount to something and believes that it can accomplish a great purpose if it pursues the ideals which have illuminated his work. Carl’s eyes sought this framed joke for the hundredth time, since his mood needed such artificial humor to make it less aware of itself, and at this moment Martha came with the rapid gait of one who is returning to vast and uncompleted tasks, although her day’s labors were at an end. This was not a pose but merely a bouncing overabundance of energy. With her was Helen Wilber, a young disciple who scarcely ever left her side. Helen had fled from a wealthy family in another city and traded her debutante’s excuse for the more fanciful robe of an ecstatic pilgrim starting to ascend from the base of veiled mountains of expression. She darted about on errands and interviews and felt the humble fervors of a novice--a tall, heavy girl with a long, soberly undeveloped face and abruptly turned features that were garlanded with freckles. She had made a fine art of her determination to persuade herself that she was masculine, giving it the intense paraphernalia of stolen words and gestures, but beneath her dubiously mannish attire and desperately swinging limbs the desires of an average woman were feebly questioning the validity of her days. She greeted Carl with her usual ringing assumption of boyishness. “Hello, old top! Been waiting long?” “Not as long as I expected to wait, considering Martha’s superb indifference to the impudence of time. Well, Martha, how have you been insulting actualities--with your usual crescendoes of insanity?” Martha reached for the device of quickly sliding the tip of her tongue over her upper lip, a movement that always gave its opiate to her embarrassment or dismay, and then smiled with a softly tragic aloofness.