He was not going to get any opportunity to study that street map at home. He decided that he would go and spend a few days at his friend Tom Alden’s little place in the country, where he would find a more congenial atmosphere. 2 Too congenial! Tom was the same perfect companion of an idle hour—instinctively expert in gilding that idleness with delightful talk until it ceased to seem mere idleness—the same old Tom that Felix had loafed away long evenings with last summer, when they were supposed to be writing novels. Tom was still desultorily working upon his novel; but he put it aside to walk in the woods and talk with Felix about Chicago. It was not, however, of the grim Chicago which loomed in Felix’s mind, that Tom talked. Tom, as Felix now realized, was a romantic soul. Chicago had been to him a series of brilliant vacation-trips, a place of happy occasional sanctuary from the dull realities of middle-class life in Port Royal: an opportunity for brief, stimulating human contacts, not at all a place to earn a living in. Lying in the cool grass beside the creek where he and Felix had spent so many illusioned hours a summer ago, he talked with dreamy enthusiasm of genial drunken poets and philosophers and friends met at the Pen Club—and of their girl companions, charming and sophisticated, whose loves were frank and light-hearted. Felix walked up and down impatiently. A year ago he too had dreamed of Tom’s Chicago— “_Midnights of revel And noondays of song!_” But he knew better now. He could imagine the Pen Club, with its boon-companionship of whiskey and mutual praise. These, he told himself, were the consolations of failure. He might, he reflected grimly, have to fall back on these things at forty. But in the meantime he would try to learn to face reality. And those light Chicago loves—he suspected that the romantic temperament had thrown a glamour over these also. He was not going to Chicago for Pen Club friendship nor the solace of complaisant femininity.... While Tom Alden reminisced of glorious nights of talk and drink and kisses, Felix was brooding over a scene inside his mind which he called Chicago—a scene in which the insane clamour of the wheat-pit was mingled with stockyards brutality and filth. This was what he must deal with.... “What’s on your mind?” Tom asked. “Nothing. Except—I came here to study my street map, and I haven’t looked inside it.” “Never mind your street map just now,” Tom said. “We’re going to the station to meet Gloria and Madge.” Madge was a cousin of Tom’s, and Gloria her especial—and beautiful—friend. They were just back from a trip abroad, and Tom had asked them out to dinner to hear what they had to tell. “You mustn’t be prejudiced against Gloria because of her eyelashes,” Tom urged. “She has rather a mind, I think.” So Felix, reluctantly, went along to the station.