Now, old Lowenstein, he can’t be all wrong--but Constance Corthwaite’s place can’t be wrong at all. This place is right--for her brand of people. And the house--now, the house must be right, too. It wasn’t what he liked himself, but it was right. It was bound to be right. It wasn’t as if she didn’t always get the best. She could have anything in the world, and she knew what was right--and she had this. And if this was right, the Club Levering was wrong. He turned a little cold at the thought. The club was his creation, it was his dream, it was, in fact, himself, and it was wrong! He stooped and picked up a sheet of the newspaper and folded it gently and exactly. Corthwaite--she knows. She’s the kind that don’t make mistakes about houses. He was not soothed and comforted in the sunlight now. He was acutely and miserably fighting with doubt and distrust. For if the Club Levering was wrong, then he was wrong. He had missed. He was cheated. He was being shown a land that he could never enter, and desolately, and suddenly now, he thought it was the only land worth entering. Oh, the terrible, silent scorn of this house, in its rightness, scorn for him and his land and his dream! Hal Levering was a poet. It seemed to him now that the house behind him had drawn together and was straining to get away from him, just as the people in it strained away from him and left him alone and outside. He tried to reassure himself. There were all kinds of people in the world, and this was America, and he was as good as anybody. “It ain’t so; I’m as good as any of ’em. What’d they ask me here for if I ain’t? You big clown you, they asked you here to sing your jazz songs, and so’s they could get a good laugh outa you. That’s what it was for, you big dummy. Didn’t you see that Corthwaite girl sneering? Sure you did. But you wouldn’t admit it! These people are right, and you’re wrong, Hal Levering. You’re a Jew. No, that ain’t it either. It’s because you ain’t a Jew--that’s it--because you’re pretending you ain’t. Because you ain’t real. That’s it. They got their own names and their own people and the things they’ve always had, but you--you’re what they call a dirty Jew.... “That’s what it is about them that’s different--it ain’t just that they got different styles in architecture--but they ain’t pretending nothing. They don’t have to.” He remembered the smile that had curled Constance Corthwaite’s lips the night before. It grew, it spread, the image of curving lips blotted out all the warm world, and he was alone before them, his heart sick with the humiliation of the degraded artist. Hal Levering rose from his chair, trembling a little, very white, just as the riding party came strolling through the box hedge. He looked down at them from the steps of the porch. They came toward him like sublime creatures oblivious of his presence and of his pain, ignoring him as they would always ignore him.