This was one of the meetings to which Jane Lauderdale could go; she had followed every motion of Pelham's with her large, intimate eyes, from a wall seat to the right, not far from the platform. Continually his own eyes sought hers, to test the effectiveness of an argument, or to draw approbation and inspiration from the source that meant most to him. Whenever there had been opportunity, she had been in his strike audiences, a vivid, sparkling fountain of encouragement and enthusiasm. Pelham's watchfulness drew from his random hearers antagonism or sympathy, a groping for his meaning, a tardy stumbling after his flying feet; of her he drank cordial understanding and abounding love. They left the hall together, and rode straight to her house. Lacking a home of their own, this house furnished an abiding-place for far-flung dreams and precious intimacies. In her very restfulness he found a spur and a stimulus. Chin cupped in her down-turned fingers, seated in her favorite wicker chair, she mused above him, as he slouched on the rug at her feet. "You were splendid to-night, boy; you're a cannibal at debating." "I'd be sick of the whole bloody business," she smiled indulgently, "if it wasn't for you." "Anyone would do just as well;" a denying finger caressed his hair possessively. "Am I that unappreciative, Joan of Lauderdale?" "Now you're poking fun. You don't deserve the taffy." "It was only taffy?" "I'm a good cook, you'll have to admit. No; you earned every word. I should think your father would have to be proud of you!" "The oratorical prodigal ... whose far country is the heaven your slim oxfords print." "Not even wings?" "We are forging them together." Hearty delights these hours with the vibrant girl always were; but they were not as heady and intoxicating as he had imagined love would be. Perhaps too heady, in another sense; there was a lack somewhere, he meditated ruefully, as his car picked its way past the guarded entrances to the entrenched mountain. A prodigal son, he had called himself; but this was one of those itching hours when he envied the erotic mire of the earlier vagrant. His body hungered morbidly for the barely sampled flesh pots of the Meade bungalow, the perilous soilure of Butler's Avenue. Night's dead peacefulness was the only reality. The moon froze ramp building and sagging shack into silver immobility; there could be no hour when bleeding forms lurched and died on this eternal background. Day's conflicts were shadowy impossibility; he could not take further part in the fantastic strife that meant death and suffering; he was caught in the midnight spell of the silent world.