He took off his spectacles and wiped them on the flap of his necktie. His eyes looked watery, as if the light had run out in tears. “I’ve always heard that the Cobdens were honest,” he went on, “three generations of honest men. They’ve built something, Miss Musser. Not a business, that’s well enough, but they’ve built a man. Listen----” He opened the pages at random and began to read. It was like the stuff in her letter. “It’s so for pages and pages,” he continued. “Every word standing out, if you get the hang of it. No tint, no art; just words, pain-born, separate like boulders in a field. He has no hopes, yet he writes what he sees.... Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa.... He watches the string of natives coming in with their tusks; he watches the crocodiles coming up to the blinding surface water; he watches the big monkeys that live in twos, and the little monkeys that live in troops. I don’t know what the world’ll get out of this, but I know what I get out of it----” She saw that John Higgins was merely thinking out loud. A few moments later he finished: “This stuff amounts to the most subtle and incredible rearraignment of imperialistic cruelty, but Dicky doesn’t mean it that way. He keeps repeating with devilish calm that it isn’t so bad as it was. It’s no particular nation, but all whites. He writes from the standpoint of a white man who remembers Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, Warren Hastings in India, Cecil Rhodes in Africa and our own dear religious settlers bringing Yankee wits and rum and disease to the red Indians. He turns over the pages of all patriotic histories with a long stick as you would poke the leaves from the face of a corpse you had made yourself. His face tries to turn away; his stomach retches, but he knows each man and each nation must bury his own dead.” “‘Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa,’” Pidge repeated, when she was alone. Summer days in New York, sleepy stewy days. The low clouds made the nights hot. Pidge was used to the “high sky” of Southern California where every inch of shadow meant coolness, where cool night fell quickly no matter how hot it had been in the sun, where there were no afterglows, nor afterheats, and you wanted a wrap the instant the sun went down. The meaning of summer in New York became a cruel meaning, in the little room off the area. It gave her an astonishing grasp of what people suffered in the tenements. Two weeks after the copy arrived from Africa, the galleys came up on the Cobden articles, and Pidge asked permission to take a set home to show two friends of Dicky’s in Harrow Street. John Higgins acquiesced. Pidge delivered these to Miss Claes and forgot all about it, until the next night when she returned to the house after dinner, and Miss Claes called her from the door of Cobden’s “parlor.” “Come in, Pidge, and we’ll shut everything out.”