Then, for a time, neither of them found more to say. Harlan, near the window, stared out into the smoke haze that a cloudy day held down upon the city; McMillan sat frowning at the floor, and the room was vaguely noisy with a confusion of sounds from outdoors: hammerings and clatterings of steel where buildings were going up; the rending of timbers and crashes and shoutings where they were going down; the uproar of ponderous trucks grinding by upon the brick-paved cross street to the south, so that the strong old house trembled with the subterranean communication of their vibrations—all to the incessantly rasped accompaniment of motor signals on the avenue. “Isn’t this a hell to be sick in?” Harlan asked, turning abruptly to McMillan. “We couldn’t raise the windows to give him air without giving him this infernal smoke that makes him cough harder. And the noise—there’s hardly a respite from it all night long! When the workmen go home the joy-riders and the taxis keep it up till daylight. He was too sick to be taken to a hospital or——” He interrupted himself with a desperate laugh. “We almost had to! Yesterday morning the servants called me, and I found the house full of men; they’d brought trucks right across the lawn, and started to work. They’d come to wreck the house—to tear it down. I told the foreman my brother was very sick, and he said in that case we’d better take him to a hospital; he had his orders from the contractor, and he was going ahead! Some of his men were already on the roof, making a horrible noise and tearing away the slate—throwing it down into the yard under Dan’s window. I had hard work to get rid of them; and they left a great hole in the roof when they went. My heaven! when such things happen how’s anybody ever to see any _meaning_ in life?” “I don’t know!” George groaned. “I don’t see much meaning in anything—not after what you’ve told me about Dan’s condition.” “McMillan, I don’t see a bit of meaning to the whole miserable business. Here’s my brother spent all his days and nights—and all his strength and health—just blindly building up a bigger confusion and uproar that smashes him; and then when he _is_ smashed, it keeps on bothering him and disturbing him—yes, and choking him!—on his very deathbed! I know your theory that it all means power, and that power may be thought beautiful—but it can’t last, because nothing can last. So what the deuce is the good of it?”