She needed to know everything about him: that she might help him. “I’ve made up my mind on that!” She told him of herself more and more: more and more easily. She told herself that she could not otherwise gain his confidence: and she needed that really to help him, really to be “friends.” In truth she craved his help, she was glad to purchase it with whatever aid her place and her connections might afford. “It is hard to speak of such things,” she said, half sitting up on her lounge, with a bare arm falling straight toward the floor. At once it was easy. The ease of her lying there before him and the glow of his eyes taking her in were a lubricant to her words. She could never have spoken so at first in a tailor-made suit. She would have laughed with the freedom of sincere denial at a friend who ventured to link the exhibition of her soul with the exhibition of her body. * * * * * It was through Laura Duffield that Tom came to his real establishment in practice. Gilbert Lomney was her cousin. For him, Laura was a brilliant woman who somehow had managed also to be good. He had great admiration for her, not a little fear. It was by her strategy that “Lomney and Rennard” was brought about. The City had welcomed its own stuff in Tom and Cornelia. The City had come from the same sort of place. At the beginning, Tom felt this not at all. He was frightened by the City. He did not understand when its heights bent down and touched him. Each suppliant before New York goes through the same amaze as the unfriendly Town proves lewdly hospitable. Few dare to admit her wantonness since the avowal would take from the measure of their prowess. In the early bewilderment of being taken-in, of finding a naked mistress in place of a shrouded goddess, the critical faculties are struck to sleep. The years of the preparing of success in Tom were like the growth of love in their delirious simplicity, the sort of wild progression that one finds best revealed in mathematics. A true tumescence. Tom found some one who liked his humor and his freedom. He introduced him to a strategic hostess. There was opened a breach in the trenched City. There was more than one of these amiable friends. Each multiplied opportunity at a geometric rate. Tom was soon in a position to choose, and from choice comes judgment. He was soon surfeited with chances, and from surfeit comes disillusion.