Weariness was his leading emotion. He was spent, physically and emotionally. He wanted her almost as much as ever. While she was no longer the remote and dazzling star she had been, the bond of flesh that had been created between them seemed a stronger, a more constant thing than blinding unsatisfied desire. But a great despair possessed him. There was so obviously nothing he could do. Just as his other disappointment had given him his first stinging impression of the irony of life, that cunningly builds a hope and then smashes it; so now he felt for the first time something of the helplessness of man in the current or his destiny, driven by deep-laid desires he seldom understands, and ruled by chances he can never calculate. From love a man learns life in quick and painful flashes. Through the open window came the din of the New York street—purr and throb of innumerable engines, rumble and clatter of iron wheels, tapping of thousands of restless feet, making a blended current of sound upon which floated and tossed the shrillness of police whistles and newsboys’ voices and auto horns. It had been the background of his life during memorable days. Once it had stirred his pulses, seeming a wild accompaniment to the song of his passion. Now it wearied him inexpressibly; it seemed to be hammering in his ears; he wanted to get away from it. He would go home that day. As always on his trips across the continent he sat apathetically smoking through the wide green lushness of the middle west. Only when the cultivated lands gave way to barren hills and faint blue mountains peeping over far horizons did he turn to the window and forget his misery and his weariness. How it spoke to his heart, this country of his own! He who loved no man, who had gone to women with desire and come away with bitterness, loved a vast and barren land, baking in the sun. The sight of it quickened his pulses, softened and soothed his spirit. Like a good liquor it nursed and beautified whatever mood was in him. When he had come back to it a year before, it had spoken to him of hope, its mysterious distances had seemed full of promise and hidden possibility. And now that he came back to it with hopes broken, weary in mind and body, it seemed the very voice of rest. He thought of long cool nights in the mountains and of the lullaby that wind and water sing, of the soothing monotony of empty sunlit levels, of the cool caress of deep, green pools, of the sweet satisfaction that goes with physical weariness and a full belly and a bed upon the ground.