The boyish look was gone from him. He might have been taken for ten years older. The thing had happened that takes place abruptly in many Americans, more among business men than artists: Youth had been put away, its trace of divine humor exchanged for adult seriousness. “Why didn’t you come to the office to-day, Dicky?” she asked. “I wanted to see you here--like this.” They were standing under the light. “Why, you’re different,” she said. “John Higgins said that. They told me so at home, uptown. I feel different, but it isn’t an improvement. And you, Pidge, you’re taller. And John Higgins says you’re doing so well.” “I’m thanking you every day for that----” She kept thinking about the change in him. If this were selflessness, she liked him better before. He had been quite unselfish enough, she thought. She didn’t see the fight in him, because it was so subtly identified with herself. She only knew that he seemed without fight. “Keep on your things, Pidge. We’ll go out somewhere----” * * * * * That was the beginning of strange days and evenings. They played at the old game of _Comrades_. Often they lunched together, occasionally with John Higgins for a third. At such times it seemed that they took _The Public Square_ with them, subscribers, advertisers, contributors, policies. It was that curious time in America when the personal and national meaning of the European war was breaking through with all its paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive at all reflected division and strife in themselves, as a deep leveling sickness. Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and terrifically complicated modern apartment in East Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the household ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of New York interiors in 1870--respectable, established, grim. The gradual speeding up of the world for a half century to the explosive point of 1914 ended with the click of the key in this hall door, and you were in the world of another day, with a spinster aunt, a widowed mother, an unmarried sister, a slowly disintegrating grandfather, and Dicky himself, not in a different guise at all--the same courteous, sincere Dicky, but now to Pidge Musser’s western eyes, utterly, revealingly comprehensible. This was the place that had made him. This was his reason for being.