He loved Lois. He said to himself he loved her. This woman he did not love. So he saw her clearly. Let him swing this clear-seeing back into the dim place of his heart that hurt! It was impossible. He could not diminish Lois after all. The result of his effort was to dispose him more pleasantly toward Miss Lord. Here he was smiling at her with a new attention that a less wise woman might have been wise enough to mistrust.... He came away with a gnawing sense of doubt. He was heart-sick more deeply than ever. Miss Lord and his cousin were creatures of a single world. They performed different parts of a single service. Both of them were supposed to uphold the prestige of this system that made money and spent it: to submit to its standards of deed and thought, to further its dominions. For this, Miss Lord had her wages, Lois her keep. _He too!_ He too had been taken in for service! For service rendered he too would receive the means of sustaining life. David had seen a coat-of-arms heralding a strange device on the façade of a great commercial building. It had puzzled him. He had forgotten it. Now he recalled it and understood it. He marveled at its telling word. It had said: “Spend me and defend me.” A great fright was being born in David.... V Tom Rennard and his sister stood under a house with a high straight stoop like a dozen alongside it. They looked up. Behind them their passing through Stuyvesant Square. The sky was very deep and warm on the moldering housetops, beyond the cool clouds. These skimmed their shadows across the Park’s shut green. They threw small puffs of gray on the gleaming creepers of the Church. They dropped to the squat red meeting-house of the Friends and lightened its brick with their dark. They went westering over the bleak dense City. “This is the number.” They mounted the stoop. Each had a hand on the iron rail that rusted under crumbling paint. A piercing rumble lay in the Park. Jangle of horse-cars, stir and laughter of children, the dry gasp of life hot over the Park from four dense sides, as over a cool well. And the Square merging with these the distances it caught on its church-steeple: hoot of river craft, gashes of dull speed echoing into sharpness as an elevated train passed through muffled houses. All of it funneled down the narrow eastward street that fell from the Square to the River: rose above the shoulders of these two: flattened back against the reticence of brownstone walls. “Not a bad house,” said Tom. “Relic of Knickerbocker glory. Some less brilliant Stuyvesant cousin may have lived in it once.” He pulled a bell-handle: its call pierced and lingered in the old mansion’s depths. The house stood unmoved like a ventriloquist.