After the sentiment of the final days the crowding, unyielding buildings, and the men that shared astonishingly their qualities, offered him a useful restorative. He found he could approximate their essential hardness again. The Street at times resembled the campus--it held so many of the men he had learned to know at Princeton. Lambert was installed in his father's marble temple. He caught George one day on the sidewalk and hustled him to a luncheon club. "I suppose I really ought to put you up here." "Why?" George asked. "Because I'm always sure of a good scrap with you. I missed not playing against you in the Princeton game last fall. Now there's no more football for either of us. I like scraps." Blodgett, he chanced to mention later, had spent the previous week-end at Oakmont. Blodgett had already bragged of that in George's presence. He forgot the excellent dishes Lambert had had placed before him. "Have you put Blodgett up here, too?" he asked in his bluntest manner. Lambert shook his head. "That's different." "Not very honestly different," George said, attempting a smile. "You mean," Lambert laughed, "because I've never asked you to Oakmont? Under the circumstances----" "I don't mean that," George said. "I mean Blodgett." "I can only arrange my own likes and dislikes," Lambert answered, still amused. Then who at Oakmont liked the fat financier? Rogers was in the street, too, selling bonds with his old attitude toward the serious side of life, striving earnestly only to spy out the right crowd and to run with it. "Buy my bonds! Buy my bonds!" he would cry, coming into George's office. "They're each and every one a bargain. Remember, what's a bargain to-day may be a dead loss to-morrow, so buy before it's too late." Goodhue planned to enter a stock exchange firm in the fall, and a lot of other men from the class would come down then after a long rest between college and tackling the world on twenty dollars a month. Wandel alone of George's intimates rested irresolute. George, since he had taken two rooms and a bath in the apartment house in which Wandel lived, saw him frequently. He could easily afford that luxury, for each summer his balance had grown, and Blodgett, now that he had George for as long as he could keep him, was paying him handsomely, and flattering him by drawing on the store of special knowledge his extended and difficult application had hoarded. To live in such a house, moreover, was necessary to his campaign, which, he admitted, had lagged alarmingly. Sylvia had continued to avoid him. She seemed to possess a special sense for the houses and the parties where he would be, and when, in spite of this, they did meet, she tried to impress him with a thorough indifference; or, if she couldn't avoid a dance, with a rigid repulsion that failed to harmonize with her warm colouring and her exquisite femininity.