It was voluptuous for Tom Rennard after the trees and the birds to give himself once more into the bond of his profession. Through the free woods he walked in manacled anarchy: through the City’s thralldom he walked free. He plunged into work. He touched the tasks of the approaching season, knew it would be his best, measured his dominion above success and was glad like a bird perched on top of its cage. He prepared a brief for a case months away from trial: he played with the strategy of an appeal in a suit not yet argued. In the brash nights of the refilling City he sat in hotel lobbies and let his mind cut clear through the flaccid provincial crowds. He journeyed uptown to a baseball game: drank in the rawness of the joy of others in a ball swiftly caught and clouted: let his heart fill with the tang of the game’s intricate and lissome grace against the sprawling pleasure of the mindless. Once more New York, an atmosphere, lay, swirled, clouded and shone around him. Then he shut his desk, an early afternoon, and went to see his sister. Her studio was unfashionable in location. It was the top floor of a crumbling red-brick house in the moiled middle East Side of the city. It was east of Murray Hill, west of Stuyvesant Square: the elevated trains snorted their cinders not far from her flowered window. Cornelia began to make money and her habitation blossomed. Persian shawls appeared in appropriate corners: new rash adventures in color out of Paris gladdened the white walls: slender vases came from exile in Chatham Square. Tom called the place his refuge from the city. “Hello,” she said. “I am glad you came. I’m lazy this afternoon.” Tom folded his coat away in the little bedroom. It had the air of a cell. The white walls were bare, the white iron bed was narrow; a small pack of books stood in the corner of the floor. “You take it easy,” he said, already at the task, “and I’ll prepare you some Turkish coffee. Have you any of that orange essence left?” He was adept and he needed to ask no further questions. They settled and sipped and talked. Cornelia was on the couch. Tom squatted on the floor. Both of them had lighted cigarettes. “Well, what adventure?” she asked. She looked more than the three years older that she was. She wore an unembroidered smock--a dull, muslin drab. Her feet were sandaled. Her hair was drawn tight back over her head, where it could not interfere with work. Her eyes were soft in the harsh angles of her face. “I was on a vacation, Cornelia. You know that means that I took care nothing should happen to me.” She laughed. “That efficient you’re not, dear boy.” “Well, there was no semblance of adventure. I tramped and drank a lot of glorious milk and slept nine hours a night.” “And----?” “And swam and paddled.” Tom wagged his head with the catalogue. “You met somebody interesting?” He stopped. “How do you know?” “You always do, don’t you? Who was it? The girl, at last?”