Later, when Roger Brevard was turning the key on the insurance company for the day, Lacy Saltonstone stopped to speak in her charming slow manner: "Mother of course is in a whirl, with Captain Ammidon about to marry that Nettie Vollar, since she is recovering after all, and our moving to Boston.... You see I'm there so often it will make really very little difference to me. Sidsall is the lucky one, though you'd never know it from seeing her.... I thought you'd have heard--why, to Lausanne, a tremendously impressive school for a year. They have promised her London afterward. I would call that a promise, but actually, Sidsall--." "Doesn't she want to go?" he asked mechanically, all the emotions that had chimed through his being suddenly clashing in a discordant misery. He bowed absently, and hastening to his room softly closed the door and sat without supper, late into the evening, lost in a bitterness that continually poisoned the resolutions formed out of his overwhelming need. He was aghast at the inner violence that destroyed the long tranquility of his existence, the clenched hands and spoken words lost in the shadows over the Napiers' garden. He wanted Sidsall with a breathless tyranny infinitely sharper than any pang of youth: she was life itself. She didn't want to go, Lacy had made that clear; and he told himself that her reluctance could only, must, proceed from one cause--that she cared for him. As he dwelt on this, the one alleviating possibility, he became certain of its truth. He would find her at once and in spite of Rhoda and William Ammidon explain that his whole hope lay in marrying her. With an utter contempt at all the small orderly habits which, he now saw, were the expression of a confirmed dry preciseness, he left his clothes in a disorderly heap. Such a feeling as Sidsall's and his, he repeated from the oppressive expanse of his black walnut bed, was above ordinary precautions and observance. Then, unable to dismiss the thought of how crumpled his trousers would be in the morning, oppressed by the picture of the tumbled garments, he finally rose and, in the dark, relaid them in the familiar smooth array. In the morning his disturbance resolved into what seemed a very decided and reasonable attitude: He would see Rhoda that day and explain his feeling and establish what rights and agreement he could. He was willing to admit that Sidsall was, perhaps, too young for an immediate decision so wide in results. The ache, the hunger for happiness sharpened by vague premonitions of mischance, began again to pound in his heart.