The room where the sun came was the room they thought they lived in. Their home, that: though they spent far less hours there than in the blinking sleep rooms, and though, of course, the sun was usually there when they were not--they who weighted each day into the City as miners go down shafts. But it was good to know the sun was there even with them away: they had hunted long for a southward room. The resilient Mrs. Lario, with her bare arms giving to no touch and her smooth throat so palpably immune from the gust of a man’s passion, above the tight composure of whose eyes brooded her hair like a black tempest of contradiction, came and cleaned. She turned the mattresses: she sprinkled water for the dust of the crumbling floors. She made the rooms gleam with a moist complacence like her own widowed virtue. But then, beside Mrs. Lario, came the sun: dried the moisture of her mop, turned all this artificed cleanness that smelt so of its triumph over dirt into a health that glowed, self-sustainedly, without a hint of being mere reform. The sun came and balanced Mrs. Lario; and made her possible. So that when Tom and David were up, ruffled and wearied, through their shafts at night, they felt that their home had been not cleaned alone but redeemed also. And if there was a flavor of must in the tidied bedrooms, the rococo sitting of the pillow-shams, the somewhat chromo-patterned regularity of things left on their bureau, there was as well good air, still a-thrill with the sun’s last coming. On Sundays, they greeted the sun as one they knew, who knew their home better than they: greeted him a bit like a familiar god with his long frank strides shattering their windows. David was making a success in his uncle’s business. He had at last achieved a salary determined rather by his place in the office than his relation with its head. Mr. Deane’s theory had unconsciously been one of compensation. He balanced his knowledge of the boy’s advantage by miserable pay. This enabled him quite honestly to say: “David gets no more than any other beginner.” An easy way of feeling just. Now David was beginning to lead the life of a young bachelor in the City. He had outgrown his little Eastside room: he was after all a representative of the Deanes. If he went to the theater, it was not right that he should sit in the gallery like a clerk. If he went hunting for rooms with this smart chap Rennard, he must not, by an admission of the low price he could afford to pay, reflect on the House of Deane. Mr. Deane was a little on his mettle with his nephew as most men with their sons. He was approaching the time of vicarious satisfaction. He made David assistant to the Credit Department, and gave him a good salary.