Big, burly boy, with his blue muffler over his throat and his hands hanging so limp beside him. He was so at ease, so friendly curious, so cool. While she was white inside with the need of telling. It was impossible. In the shadow, a pain viced Cornelia’s homely face--lent accent to the wrinkles already upon her brow. It went, leaving its sharp bite. “How have you been, David?” He might still ask her, force her to tell him.... David began to talk. He rambled along the flowered paths of his own green life. He forgot about her dream, he forgot about Cornelia. As her chance of self-bestowal, of drawing him back with her to the self-land she had left, faded before his dear indifference, Cornelia’s hands were fists, her soul retracted with hurt.... He chatted. She left him to put on her hat. She saw herself in the mirror: plain Cornelia, Motherer! who had found her boy at the age when boys go forth. Her mouth affirmed the bitter resolution that must make it hard: her eyes fought against their tears--David was there--with a dry will that must dull and dim them. The ineffable glow of confidence and of the sense of being sweet faded still farther from her face, leaving it older and less sweet. So she returned to David: they went out to dine. VII There were times when the two young men sat in silence, looked at each other: and Tom was depressed and beaten by the world: he needed comfort of his friend. Then, out of the silence, David talked. A new way he had of bending low in his chair with one leg curled beneath it, the other straight out, while his arm rested on the forth-stretched knee and his palm turned upward. He would talk low then, try to give to Tom a thing he was not sure he had himself, and was not sure but that Tom had far more than he. He believed he was recalling Tom merely to his own possession. “Think of what you have done in your life! You should think of that.” “What have I done? What does it matter what I have done? What am I?” “You conquered your life, you made a new one for yourself.” “David, our deeds are not ourselves. We are what we are, not what we do. Our deeds, if anything, are what we have thrust from us. If I have done much, I am the emptier.” “Are you not always living and being anew?” “I am engulfed in a vicious world whose viciousness I know. I am false, David. I play dirty games, dirty tricks. I do my share of the betraying of the world, before I get my share of the thirty pieces of gold. You do not know. I have open eyes. I betray, loving loyalty: I do dark work, loving the sun.”