Tom laughed. “Come! You need some more coffee,” to David. “You are half asleep. I can’t get along without coffee. Can you? The world is so much a dream, one’s sense of fitness makes one go to sleep beholding it. I find I can do endless work, with endless cups of coffee. I wonder who invented coffee. A shame, isn’t it, that the true benefactors of the human race are nameless. The Gods tied Prometheus to a rock and set a vulture on him, for giving us fire. The other saviors of life they have made nameless.” He skipped nimbly from parable to fun: from apostrophe to laughter. David found himself loving the mere exercise of following his new friend. It was like a cross-country run with an agile pathman. Over brook and rock he tried to leap with him. No time to look and to consider. The way was nothing, the leaping everything. The story was forgotten. It was shivered away in the pelt of Tom’s succeeding words. Cornelia was silent. She was pensive. She had stopped listening to Tom. When he went galloping like this, he was running away from something deep in himself. She knew. He would take this thing within him he needed to escape and toss it far and rush after it. Let him rush. There was David laughing. Tom no longer needed to smoke cigarettes. David was glowing near his finger-tips. Coffee was gone. Night had come up from the street like incense of incantation. It curled its way into the room, it subdued the flame of the room to a warm ash. Tom lighted a lamp. No one spoke. A golden ray filtered about the table. It left them in shadows. David got up to leave. “I was so happy to be here,” he said. Cornelia clasped his hand deeply in her own. It was warm. She found it hard to speak. “Boy!” her heart sang to him. She managed to say: “You must come soon again.” ... “And again and again.” Her heart had the last word. Tom took David down through the dark halls where gas-jets shivered like emprisoned birds. He was not happy with this last silence of Cornelia. It was as if she had said: “Why do you bring a guest here and then insult him and not let him even know that this is what you have done?” His eyes were hot, the hand that took David’s was cold. “Good-by,” he said, “I hope we are going to be--friends?” “Oh, yes!” exclaimed David.... David walked under swaying houses. They were aburst with broken flame. He walked among scattered men and women driven with unbelieving will and eyes unseeing toward these fires--toward fires that meant love to them and warmth. It was the evening before work: the breach in the dull circle of toil. Hearts were released. Blood surged in vain encouragement through the habit-hardened lives of the workers. Men and women were floods of longing torrenting the streets.... David walked under the spread wings of his own sweet mood. Life was full. Full of the play of voices and of bodies: full of adventure. Life was the mystery of finding.... * * * * *