“I was amazed at the bright muddle he’s in. I tell you, he’s inquiring and inquiring. It’s glorious! He told me the Spanish-Cuban question was not a mere matter of relief for the _reconcentrados_! ‘There’s something else beside Principle,’ he announced.” “Whereupon, I am sure, you added: ‘The same’s true of the Monroe Doctrine.’” “If I had, it would have shocked him. I did not. His new searching eye has not yet reached that sacrosanct past. I was in no mood to startle him, Cornelia. I felt different. I like David Markand. I respect him. What if he has the usual illusions? In his soul, they are no longer the smug knock-kneed lies I hate. They become true: at least, beautiful. My facts seem shoddy and ugly--and lying, in the warm glow of his faith.” They were silent both. Tom did not often speak so tenderly. “Wait and see,” he concluded. “I see already,” said his sister. So David came. He was to leave at once after the Sunday dinner: push his way through the depleted Sabbath City: he was to ring the bell on the brass-plate marked _Rennard_, come up three dusty stairs and find them waiting through the door that made two worlds of the black hall and the bright room. “I am so glad to see you!” Cornelia had him at once in hand. He looked very tall beside her sharp slightness. She took his hat and his coat. “Do sit down.” David was anxious to look everywhere about him, to touch all these mysteries with the warmth of his eyes so that they might be cold and strange no longer. He did not quite dare. He kept looking near Cornelia: then, with still greater ease, toward Tom. In this his sensitivity was clear. A glance was an intimate gesture, a visit, to David. He could not comfortably look at what he did not already comfortably know. “Tom has told me not half enough about you. Just enough,” she smiled, “to make me know it was not half enough.” Tom apprehensively tested his new friend. His gladness at seeing David understand Cornelia released his worry into laughter. “Oh,” said David, “it is just the same in my case with what Mr. Rennard has said about you.” He looked at the little cast between the windows and blushed: he folded his hands and looked at them. Tom remained silent. There was no need of talking: and although he talked much it was deeply true that Tom talked only when he had need of talking. He was comfortable now. He lit a cigarette, and lay prone, propped by his arms, on the window-seat; he let the conversation of the two go over him and smoked. “You know,” Cornelia said, “we are not New Yorkers either.” David met her eyes. “Your brother told me about how you ran away.” Cornelia was silent. What could she say to swell the room’s slow freedom?