David knew the nepotic alloy in his good fortune. It did not trouble him. He thought, somehow, he deserved it. He recalled vaguely an old remark of Tom’s about another matter. “Men who get what they deserve always do so, you will find, for inappropriate reasons.” David was letting the sweet illogic of America come in on him. He was lost in wonder at the perfect and complex weave of manifest occurrence which armored the reality, latent and different, beneath. The weave was one of grace, good will and beauty. It was in contradiction to the moving nakedness he felt fatefully aswing below his life and the whole City. He was after all in much a child: one who wanted the world to be good to him: to whom the real was the most splendid of fairy-tales. He fitted into this social structure so close akin to the land where hags turn into princesses and pumpkins become coaches. He was that sort: the sort who wanders blithely through an enchanted forest where great black trunks of trees stand under a green sea of murmur like protective stanchions and who picks up an acorn, finds it to be a golden apple, eats it with neither indigestion nor surprise. The whirling petulance of American life, its oneness with the tempo and technique of the dream, was very near and very sweet to David. There was then a true immersement of David in this world. And in this fact a danger. Nothing is so rebellious as reality. No man who does not first move with the world can change it. If the deep mute sense of life in David pushed ever upward in revolt, that revolt would be the mere fused head of all his being: of the world’s: it would find its articulated deed. He would go farther, infinitely, in rebellion, than the rebellious Tom whose mental area of understanding kept him in a sort of passionate inertness. The emotions of Tom Rennard were conservative: the part of him that loved loved what was still and plumbed--and _there_; the manifest world he found rather than its latency of change. Only his mind ventured ahead into potential realms. His mind was much like a courier at work in advance to fit and to pare down conditions for the advent of his master. So Tom felt a hazard in his friend. He wished to live in the world that he found. He wished to live with the friend that he had found. It was needful, therefore, that his friend should live there also: that he should change just in so far as to fit Tom’s world, yet not so greatly change as to be no longer David. Tom realized that the world’s acceptance he desired in David, and its possession he feared, were very close to one another. He looked at his friend, and wondered....