He was a spiritually sprawling creature. He had no coördination. If his heart was touched, how did his mind respond? If his mind, where was the response in deed? It seemed to David that what he did wore away the energy of his mind, dullened his heart: and what he felt and thought became impediments to those acts which his living called for. He was a loose-bound bundle of life, rolling down a chute.... In the fall, Constance Bardale telephoned to him. “I am back. When can you come to see me?” It was always hard for David to meet a sudden situation on the wire. He needed a face and a warm smile to talk to. He was afraid he had been dull in greeting Constance. For so long a time he had not thought of her at all! “Then, I’ll expect you Saturday to tea.” She had not suggested an evening. The choice of the formal hour meant nothing to David. “I must make her know--somehow I must make her know I can’t go on.” David said this to himself, going to see her. He did not recall that he had failed to write since the apparition of the little girl in the car. The poignancy of that vision was faded. But it had left its mark. In its loveliness it had blighted certain ugly things in his heart: disappeared. The condition whence sprang the ugly things was still in David. He was not cured. He was merely bitterly aware that he was not well. Constance Bardale appeared different. Her new Paris gown was strange and stiff and be did not like it. She was far away within it. Even her voice had the apartness of alien adventures. She took his hand swiftly and manoeuvered him into a chair. “It is good to find you so flourishing. What _do_ you get out of New York air to make you flower so! I thought of you particularly in a little Normandy town where we stopped with friends. A Napoleonic Baron--very plebeian that, for France. There was a gardener--of the château--who had the one true aristocracy. A big brusk fellow. How he adored his flowers and his vegetables! He reminded me of the way you are sometimes.” David thought how hard it was going to be to break the news of his resolve to Constance. It dawned on him now that it might be unnecessary. Of a sudden, “She has decided for me!” he announced, amazed, to himself. He looked at her. Once more she meant discovery. For months, now, she had been far from his senses, but his mind had thought her close. Now his mind knew her far away, and his senses clamored. They were at a point far anterior to their first warm meeting. No hint of intimacy: no hint that it had ever been: no credible sign that it could ever be. She talked fluently, her words and gestures took on for David the nature of a sinuous veil, a blank blue of smiling nugatories behind which the woman he had known retreated.