Fanshaw sat stiffly in his chair looking out of the window at the sunny, cloud-flecked sky. In his hands he was folding and unfolding the newspaper Nan had dropped. His mind seethed with its phrases. Headlines in the ornamental print of the magazine section danced and writhed and squirmed mockingly through his head: Was it love lured young David Wendell to his doom? Known to frequent low companions ... inveterate slummer ... Despair over money matters or jilting by Back Bay girl led him first to try to ship as a sailor and at last to that final orgy in a foreign restaurant on Hanover Street... Victim of infatuation for some beautiful flower of the slums ... I must get this out of my head or go mad. Fanshaw started walking back and forth in front of the window clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back. Nan came back into the room, her face calmer, a little smile hovering at the edges of her lips. "I'd have just lain down on the floor and shrieked if Fitzie had stayed any longer." "She has the holy stupidity of an early Christian saint," said Fanshaw. "But let's have some hot tea, Lord knows we'll need it." "There's fresh hot water on the gas." "I'll get it." In the kitchenette he stood still a moment with the teakettle in his hand. The smell of the Morgue, the old wax-faced man in uniform who led the way down a grey passage, and Nan's heart beating madly against his arm when they came to the slab where the body lay diminished and pitiful under a sheet ... Fanshaw tried to rid his mind of the memory. The steam from the kettle was scalding his hand. As he was leaning over to pour some hot water into the pot, Nan looked up into his face from the armchair and said: "Do you feel this fearful ache, as if your head would burst with it all?" Fanshaw nodded quietly, poured himself some fresh tea, and went to sit by the window. Wenny's face, when the sheet was pulled off, bruised and mashed, the strange smiling look of the blue full lips, and his shoulders rigid and calm like very old carved ivory. "What have the people in the Fine Arts Department had to say about all these beastly insinuations?" "They've been extremely decent, as far as I know; of course the University doesn't like one's getting in the papers." "Poor little Wenny, even dead he gets us into scrapes." "Doesn't it make you hate people?" "I can't walk along the street without shuddering, Fanshaw... I'd always thought of all the faces drifting by along the pavement, joggling opposite you in trolley cars, as vaguely friendly and lovable; I wanted to be part of them, to dive into the crowd like into a sea..." "That was Wenny's idea." "But now I know what swine they are. If they had a drop of human kindness these hideous articles in the papers wouldn't be allowed."