Nearly two years it was since he had seen in a street-car a small girl, and walked through a world suddenly shriveled. What after that? He too had shrunken and grown like the world, so that once more the world seemed right for him. Now another change. The world was gone altogether. None of its tortured standards near him any more to measure him and call what he was good. He stood naked in a sort of psychic space: he saw how soft, how idle, how small was his soul. It came to David how he hated himself, and how he was so full of this defeat upon him, that he could love no person and could have kind thoughts nowhere. All his senses were caught up in this tangle of himself. He felt he must grow far beyond the lowness where he now stood, to look with free eyes again upon another. Tom was there, however. Tom was a part of himself--a part, then, of that he must detest. David called on Miss Daindrie. He went there and was silent. It seemed a place, wide like clear air, where he could look on himself. He had no sense of her. He said to her: “Why do you ask me to come again? I am not amusing: I have nothing to give you.” And she: “Come next week.... What night, next week, can you come?” He did not understand. But he was at a pass where even this element of not understanding could not much hold him. He was not interested in Miss Daindrie. He was rapt in a hateful inner spectacle. What he needed was calm and clarity and strength to look at himself. This he found, sitting in the room with her, and her few words glowing steadfast over his eyes like candles. So he came. She invited him to dine. When he entered the drawing-room he felt he was late and they were waiting for him. Doctor Westerling was there. A slight small man with a limp stepped forward from his chair and as David took his hand he liked him. Mr. Judson Daindrie. Mrs. Daindrie had a cordial smile. It was all strange to David--this warmth, this kindness. He could not understand it. He felt a cloud over the face of Conrad Westerling and the Doctor’s will dispersing it till it was gone. The struggle and stress of this he thought he could better understand. Mrs. Daindrie was saying to him: “Won’t you take Helen down, Mr. Markand?” And there was Westerling offering the precedence through the door to a Miss Sophie Laurence who seemed very heavy and stupid. All of these pretty ways were disconcerting since they hid something, David felt, and he knew not what. He became part of the round table. Feeling himself a part and feeling Mrs. Daindrie at his left smile and be warm to him, David was eager to move himself away, just so he could truly see that he was part of this bright round table. Miss Daindrie smiled at him, as at an accomplice. “These are my family,” she seemed to tell him. He was at ease. He was unafraid of silence. So was Miss Daindrie. He said to himself: “I am sitting here quietly silent, just like Miss Daindrie.”