"So much of that is sheer nerves ... in a man. In you it's different. There's something rock bottom about women that men haven't at all. We are lichen. If we are too alive we burn up and shrivel.... I wonder if he isn't a little too alive." "Nonsense." "Do you know you do us a lot of good, Nan?" "If you think, young man, that I'm going to be anybody's rock of ages, you are mistaken, I can tell you that." The others were waiting for them at a corner where a drugstore sent planes of white and greenish light slanting to the gleaming mud-filmed pavement. "This is my street, people," said Betty Thomas. "But we'll take you to your door. Remember the holdups," said Wenny. "It'ld be so dreadfully exciting to be held up." "It's on my way home anyway, Betty." Nan took the girl's arm and pulled her with her across the street. The two men followed them up a street of apartment houses where patches of lighted windows made a yellow blur in the fog above their heads. Before the word Swarthcote on a glass door they stopped. "Good night all," said Betty Thomas. "Thank you, deary, for the lovely supper and everything." The door closed behind her. With Nan in the middle the three of them walked on. "How cosy it is this way in the fog?" she said. "It makes me feel wonderfully sentimental," Wenny said slowly. "Wagner makes me feel sentimental anyway, but Wagner plus fog ... like sitting on the curbstone and letting great warm tears flow down my cheeks till the gutter simply gurgled with them." "I say," said Fanshaw. "Not a bit of it," broke in Nan. "I feel jolly, like roasting apples in front of an open fire. We're so secure all three of us together this way and the world drifting by, dinner at Aunt M.'s and tomato bisque and croutons and love and hate and all that outside drifting by like fog." "Harmless you mean, Nan. I shouldn't say so.... Do you think its harmless, Wenny?" "May be for some people, Fanshaw." "No, I don't mean that. O, you are so lackadaisical, Fanshaw," Nan said bitterly. "I mean something more active.... The three of us conquering, shutting the fog and the misery out, all that helpless against us. But I'm talking like a book." "You are a little, Nan," said Wenny laughing.