The important thing for Lois, since she was a woman, lay in the need of being sensible. Lois knew what this meant. She knew as well the proportional insignificance of her own girlish impulses. Lois loved to play, loved to be loyal to a friend, would have loved to love a man. But these were part of her childhood, and childhood was a special state. Its needs were indulgences one must outgrow. Childhood was of the same dim category as art and stories. It wasn’t true. It was “make-believe.” It lied. Muriel had already cast it aside like her short dresses. Lois was aware she was carrying it a bit too far and too long. She was sixteen and in ankle skirts and her braids were already gathered on her head. She deemed herself brave and a trifle foolish to be so frolicsome at sixteen. She was unswervingly confident of knowing how to change at the needed moment. Meanwhile, she felt herself slightly inferior in the things that held her and in the moods she loved. The rule of life was to harden the present into a mold for the future. Yet Lois could not resist pouring herself still into immediate and short-lived moments: giving herself to emotions that must have no future. The gay spirit still danced fast. Inexorably, from without, the things she learned bore inward, seeped downward, stifled the things she had merely always felt. Her acquired consciousness was a slow acid mist that would eat away the stir and laughter of her birth. The gay spirit danced fast, though it was dancing to death. All this was Lois. All this was drawing, with her and in her, near to David. With David the stalwart muteness of the years that inclosed him with his mother: the sting and the song of his father: the drowsy stir of the Town not yet awakened, not yet awakened to its death in the crash of the industrial Age. Two little teeming worlds, spying each other, craving each other across the Nothing.... * * * * * David and Thomas Rennard had agreed on an evening by letter. They were going to dine together, and then to theater. Tom waited in the lights of a Broadway chop-house. He would not know the man he met: this he knew. He stood quite still and gauged the crowds. The heavy strokes of their passing fell against his measured life. They separated him as he stood there from the thoughts and fruits of his growing. Tom stood graceful and free as few men do. His weight was equal on both feet: his arms were unpropped: his back curved subtly in rhythm with his head. Only in the faint peer of his eyes was there defect. Tom was nearsighted. He did not admit this. He wore no glasses, despite the advice of doctors. His best friends had no inkling that when he recognized them, distant, on the street, it was not by sight of their features but by knowledge of the accents of their walk.