Pidge didn’t have her guard up. The choke and the shame were too swift for her self-control. For the first time in many days the tears broke, the extra scaldy sort. If she had only been permitted to keep that first check uncashed for a few days longer!... The next was a day of dullness and misery, a May day of rain. Crossing Broadway, as she hurried to luncheon, she passed Rufus Melton in the crowd. Her lips parted to call, but she checked in time. He hadn’t seen her. She found herself standing loosely in the traffic, her hand to her mouth, until a taxi driver roared at her, and she swung into the stream of people again and reached the curb. XIV ISOLATION PIDGE was leveled with personal shame. Try as she would, she was as lacking in the ability to detach herself from Melton, as from the influence of her father. She had felt the boy’s power over her, and knew innately that she would feel it again; that this sort of thing wasn’t a mere touch and go; that meetings like this, which appear sporadic on the surface, have twined roots beneath. She had been taught from a child that nothing merely happens. The incentive that made her lend him the fifty dollars, which she had held uncashed for nearly a month, did not mean to her now a mere impulsive mistake. It was a symbol of a giving to this boy--of a blind but eager something out of the depths of her heart. Late in June a letter came to her from Dicky Cobden, who was at Coquihatville on the Equator, where as he said, “the sun’s rays fall as straight as a tile from a roof.” ... Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more than I did that night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off a lot of words afterwards. Never again. But I’m going to stay with it, Pidge.... I’ve just had ten days here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries of the Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all as these exiled white men do; that God is a rubber man with ivory legs; that the natives are vermin, not only to be walked over, but to be stamped into the ground. They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered at.... I think so much about you. Of course, this isn’t news to you, but I say it, because it is so different from what I thought it would be. Something snapped when I got to the Kong.... All fat and decoration are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the same. Only in New York I thought that we were both wrapt in the same sort of film, a tinted filmy sort of glamour that stretched out as we went different ways. That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this awful isolation of being a separate creature from everybody, worst of all from you.... ... Next morning in the office John Higgins called her in to his desk. “Dicky has sent in some stuff. We begin to publish in August.”