That was the trouble. He did not want to write friendly letters.... He wanted to write angry letters. He wanted to tell her to stop writing to him—to let him alone, and let him forget her, as she would soon forget him. He wanted to say: “You know, and I know, that your moment of freedom, and all it promised, is over for good now. Springfield has got you, you belong to your family again, you will never come back except as the wife of some fat Springfield manufacturer, to see the sights, or go to the theater with him and show off your new gowns, and—yes, you will come to Community House, and visit your old class, and as you go away you will say to your husband, ‘I used to know such a quaint and interesting boy here—I wonder what has become of him!’ And your fat husband will put his fat cigar into the other corner of his fat mouth, and say, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s a good thing your folks got you back to Springfield when they did!’ But he will be wrong, at that; Springfield is your natural habitat, you would have gone back there anyway....” He wanted to write absurd things like that to her. Instead, he wrote friendly letters, “frank” and comradely and cool, in the tone in which their whole relationship had been couched from the first, up to that insane moment on the station platform.... He was ashamed of himself for thinking so much about her. Of course he was not in love with her! He was merely lonely. Clive was still preoccupied with that troublesome girl to whom he had darkly and allusively referred in their infrequent luncheons together. He needed other friends. He called on Roger and Don one Sunday afternoon, and they were primping to go out to a tea, and urged him to come along. “It’s at Doris’s—you know Doris, don’t you? Doris Pelman. You’ll like her.” Doris Pelman’s apartment, somewhere on the north side, was like Don’s and Roger’s in having a certain impressive charm which consisted precisely in its being un-homelike. It was meant, somehow, to be looked at, rather than lived in. The chairs were thin-legged and rickety, but doubtless genuine antiques; the rugs were hung on the walls instead of on the floor; and on the walls, too, were dim Chinese paintings to whose beauty Felix was dense; yet altogether the place had an effect of being somewhere quite out of the world, and Felix liked it for that. He was introduced at once to half-a-dozen young men and women, and in the course of the afternoon to half-a-dozen more. The young men greeted Don and Roger with a languid enthusiasm, and the young women with a sort of boisterous camaraderie. Felix was struck by something at once delicate and artificial about these young men, something which he had at first noted and then became oblivious to in Roger and Don. Among them, he felt somehow coarse and brutal.... He had an impulse to swear, or spit on the floor.