But to sit still another hour is impossible. Perhaps I am to die: perhaps I am to admit that I have failed: perhaps I lay my hand at last on a Secret deadlier than death! All these things may be, this alone surely: that I must get out of my room! _l_ Spring is a grimace when one’s heart is gray.... Men and women coming from work: in eyes and mouths the sprites of Spring peer forth at the white clouds. Washington Square is a well of muddy life, and its trees are young girls dancing at the brink ... dangerously close their tinkling hands to the suck and grime of the depths. Sixth Avenue is a long and hollow passage where flows the bilge of New York. Spring cannot hunch low enough to enter. I choose Sixth Avenue. For when one’s heart is gray, Spring is a grimace.... I am almost cheered by this contrast. I am hungry. I turn east once more: in the Brevoort café I order a good dinner. I cannot eat. The mirrors, the hard floor, the so deliberately joyous guests are not Spring, are brittle pasts of Spring, specimens of Spring long dead, preserved in alcohol. Spring hurts, yet it is fecund: it may come nearer to my exiled heart if I am not afraid to be hurt. I walk back toward Sixth Avenue. My long siege of myself seems to be over and to have left me nothing. I am a little light of head, being so light of stomach, but my mind is taking on its normal compartmental tightness, its normal limits: its normal weakness: even its normal satisfactions. --Is the spell over? And have I dreamed that Mildred sent me on a crazy quest? _I could see her to-night!_ And if a ghost of that horror still remained, would we be aware of it, warm in the sweet flesh of our love?--O Mildred, I am weary, and I hunger. Take me. Wrap me away. Make me wholly man by being wholly woman. I know this pang of will against its own inevitable surge. I have passed a phase. But Mildred is not yet there: nor can I reach her heart save through the heart of myself. I must go on.... The Secret! Sixth Avenue. Rattle of trains like dry words in a mouth obscene with secrecy. Why do I walk Sixth Avenue again, since I was going to dare the hurt of Spring? I stop, a small sign in a second-story window holding me: MRS. LANDSDOWNE ... A modest sign ... and a late afternoon at the Institute in Winter. Four of us in our aprons chatting, smoking, the day’s work done. The windows are black already with the night, shutting in snugly warmth and fire with us. Ford, whose work is closest to my own, Ford speaks: “There’s one of them, of all I’ve tested, just one, has authentic power. An inscrutable hag from London. No incense, no scenery, no occult traps. And no sentiment, no gush. That’s why she’s poor, I suppose. Women pass her up for a picturesque liar. A prophetess who’s not a prima donna, wherever she is, is in a wilderness. But she is tremendous. Mrs. Landsdowne, her name.”