Tom knew a way. This inner inhibition stood objectified in David. Let him capture David. David was his old love of giving instead of constantly taking, of being calm and passive instead of constantly pursuing. In him, Tom saw the restful cleanliness of despising this race he was running hotly: the futility of spending one’s dreams upon a contest that was never done and whose prize was death. He would not give up his entry. He needed the mundane sense of power, the badge of success: he was too sensual to forego the liquor of attention. But he needed also to still the voice that kept saying: “Fool!” By the old process of projection, he now saw these words in the eyes of David. If he could have David, he could have silence. He watched him with a growing steadfastness and a dwindling clarity. He knew at last that he wanted to win him. He knew that the affection between David and Cornelia stood most in his way. All that year, he studied David. He came to understand his habits and his moods. He inserted himself upon his groping friend with the deliberate reserve of a chemist applying weighed ingredients to a solution. The measuring was no easy task. David was within himself. He was hidden. It was plain he showed more of his mind and spirit to Cornelia than to her brother. They spent evenings, late afternoons together. Walks on Sundays became almost a custom. Tom was frequently along. There was no slightest wish to bar him. But Cornelia encouraged those very traits in David that must keep him intractable, secure to himself. “And the world,--and the world?” Tom argued. “You are living in the world. It touches you on every side, at every instant. You are wrong to try to ignore or to despise it.” Usually, Cornelia answered for her friend. “We are the world, if we choose to have it so. What you mean by the world is only the gross and the impure. Why alloy yourself with that?” Tom laughed. He knew this was David working upon his sister. Her life and her work were essentially conformist. She was no hermit, no rebel. She had had her great revolt, she had settled. She was not so very different from him. But Tom was too wise to say these things before their friend. To humiliate Cornelia before David would have the effect of estranging him. David would judge him and not understand. The idea that he could influence Cornelia was beyond David’s belief.... All this behind Tom’s laughing. He kept silent, above all kept pleasant. He saw Cornelia’s motherhood once more hunting and hungry. She was going to preserve David from a hostile world, though it be with her own body. He watched her passion and David’s dispassionate compliance. He worked his own will when they were alone. “Cornelia has a habit I can well enough understand of wishing to make my friends into what she would have liked to be, herself.” “Isn’t she what she would like to be herself?” asked David.