"O, now please dear! O, now please dear!" Fanshaw was saying, clenching and unclenching his hands, staring into the crowded twilight of the library behind his mother's head. Susan, tall, with genial horse teeth, came in with a tray of tea things. "O, your hair's acomin' down, mum. Can't I fix it for you, mum?" "Do, Susan, please," said Mrs. Macdougan in a faint voice, drooping against the pillow. Fanshaw brought up a small table and poured out a cup of tea. His lips were compressed and trembling. When Susan had gone he said in a quiet, expressionless voice: "Now, mother, you are getting yourself worked up over nothing. I assure you there is nothing whatever between me and any girl." "You always were a truthful boy, but no matter, no matter... There's not enough sugar in this tea, dear. O, why don't people ever give me things the way I like them?" Fanshaw dropped another lump in her cup. She began to drink the tea in little sips. The wrinkles in her face relaxed. Fanshaw was looking out of the window at the snow, rosy with sunset, and the intense purple shadows behind the barberry bushes. His mind was all drawn hotly into the image of Nan that day at the Logans' with a net of pearls over her hair like a girl by a Lombard painter. Against the snow, the fervid rose and purple, how fine she would be. "Well, I must leave you, mother," he said. "I must go over to Cambridge." "Don't be late this evening." "No, dear." * * * * The wind was nipping and frosty with a smell of mudflats on it and salt-eaten piles. Fanshaw, walking up T Wharf between Wenny and Nan, sniffed with relish the harbor air, looking at the agewarped houses and the masts and tackle of the fishing schooners against the grey sky. He had pulled his buff woolen muffler up until it covered the lobes of his ears and had sunk his hands deep in his overcoat pockets. In the forehead between the eyes the wind pressed now and then like biting cold iron. "If I had been a man," Nan was saying, "I should have gone to sea." "But think of it in this weather... It's delightful to take a stroll and look at the harbor and the shipping and go back to a warm room. But think of being out in it always. Such beastly cold, grimy, monotonous work." Fanshaw felt his teeth almost on edge as he spoke. How differently made people must be who could stand that sort of thing. The wharf was empty. From the stubby stovepipes of the galleys of the close-packed schooners came an occasional rift of blue smoke, a whiff of bacon and pipes and stuffy bunks snatched away in a gust of wind. "I may go yet someday," said Wenny. "But think," Fanshaw shuddered. "Think of handling frozen ropes in a wind like this." He thought of gritty ropes cutting through gloves and flesh, ripping the calloused flesh of men's palms. That story of Jack London's he had read years ago. It must have been that that put it in his head, the sight of blood on ice-jagged, tarry ropes.