He saw Fay quite clearly. Fay was dark, regular of feature, beautiful even. Her face was hard. It had none of the free loveliness of sixteen years. It roused in David passion more nearly than affection, the need to dominate rather than to help. David saw her straight mouth, her veiled eyes, the squareness of her forehead: he tried to remember that she had laughed and joked with Lois, was delightful snubbing her solemn brother. Her lively brightness seemed strange to her immobile face. “Besides, Lois is her chum, and look at Lois!” he argued with himself and he looked. He knew that her tenderness was like an early yellow violet. He set aside his first forbidding instinct about Fay. He forgot it, altogether.... In contemplation of each other, these two were like two worlds, each with its atmosphere and its teeming life and its fires, each with its intense exclusive consciousness, thrust suddenly close out of the silences of Space. They felt the indefeasible Past that summed their difference: its involute progression of separate thought and deed reaching from the mist of their beginnings. They were separate: Nothing was between them. Yet they were being drawn together. When Lois came down to breakfast, David was gone. There was just time to kiss her father as he trudged back into the dining room, hatted and overcoated, smoking hard at the day’s first cigar. Mr. Deane’s true genius for system was at work even at half past eight. When he reached his train at Fiftieth Street, his cigar was done. It was a smaller cigar than he smoked later in the day. “Well, good-by.” He stood in the doorway. Lois jumped from her chair and threw her arms about his neck and kissed him. She loved her father. It was somewhat a maternal love. She knew that he was rather the defensive and serviceable member of the household. One day, she visited her father at his offices downtown. She walked a bit fastidiously through the murky sales-department on the ground floor where the bright yellow oak and the beveled glass and the shadows under long tables depressed her. She saw men moving about in shirt-sleeves: grimy boys that ambled in and out of doors whose jaws seemed busier with gum than their slack minds with business. They led her to a spiral iron stair through whose slatted steps she could see the bowed heads below of men at desks and women bent over papers. It had appeared to her first that this was a hostile world, she was frightened to have come upon it.