“It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to give up anything,” Dick shrugged away. “What’s the use of going over it? The thing’s threadbare.” “How are things with you now, Dick?” “Hell to pay on the ranges. Matthew wants me to spend part of the winter there and I think I may. It was well enough to keep your hand on from here in the old days, but things are different now. It’s going to take brains to handle that yapping crowd of Slovaks up there.” “How can you handle it on the ground?” “Watch things. Let them know you’re there. Be a bit more friendly. They like the idea of the city men being on the ground, you know. And I could keep an eye on some of these raw superintendents. There’s a good deal of mishandling, you know.” “Well, I’m telling you, Dick, that if things get any worse we’ll have a time handling every one.” Dick nodded and went away. He was in a nasty temper. He was becoming increasingly resourceless out of actual working hours. While he was at work he was all right. It was after six o’clock that things wore out. He plowed through diversions too quickly, try as he might to make them last. The crowd he had been “traveling with,” he told himself, were becoming very tiresome. He knew exactly when they would do everything they did--at what stage of the evening each one of them would change his temper or his way of talking, and it was all boring. He drifted into cafés, but the acquaintances whom he met there all knew about him and Cecily, and though plenty of groups tried to attach him, and would gladly have done so, he had an irritated sense of the comments about him that kept him from wanting to draw down the fire of more of them. It irritated him, too, to know that his gayety was becoming more and more perfunctory and that he was not getting fun out of things which should have been fun. Several deliberate efforts to amuse himself had failed completely, ending with reaction and disgust. He had tried, in company with some men who were used to that sort of thing, to pick up some girls at a public dance hall--and long before the expected end of the evening, found himself so let down and bored that he left the crowd, with the flimsiest excuse. He had tried a bit of joyriding, but the seductions of that experience with the almost professional joyriding girl who knew just how to curve into the arm of the man at the wheel of the car had left him not only cold, but amused in a kind of sarcastic, unsmiling way. There were times when he felt that he had lost his youth and his power to be amused--his ability to enjoy things. Cecily had taken the verve out of the very things which had been contested points and for the right to enjoy which he had so stubbornly contended.