According to his philosophy there was nothing else on earth to do about it. Doubtless she’d ultimately forgive him, but her respect he couldn’t hope for at present; and as for any deeper sentiment, if ever there had been any hope in his heart that he might one day awaken it, now he knew it was wriggling in its death-throes, making him, by turns, either frightfully unhappy or resentfully reckless. The hopeless part of it was that, unlike weaker men, he had no desire to drown sorrow in any irregular and unworthy fashion. Many men of many minds turn to many things seeking the anodyne in one form or another—the nepenthe of forgetfulness, rarer than the philosopher’s stone. Neither wine nor the dreary quest for heart-ease among frailer companions ever appeals to any but weak minds. And the boy, not knowing what to do, turned to his work with a renewed energy resembling desperation. It is the only hope for ultimate anesthesia. Also, he took to prowling by night, being too unhappy to remain in his studio so near to Stephanie. He prowled about Broadway and Long Acre with Badger Spink, whose restless cleverness and self-absorption ended by wearying him; he prowled with Clarence Verne one night, encountering that strange sphinx by accident, and strolling with him at hazard through the purlieus of Chelsea. Both men seemed deeply preoccupied with problems of their own, and though they knew each other only slightly they maintained the reticence of intimacy—an odd assumption, as Cleland thought afterward. Yet, one of them was very sick for love, and the other very sick of it; and, besides, there roved with them a third and unseen companion, through the crooked, lamp-lit streets, whose shrouded arm was linked in Verne’s. And perhaps that accounted for the sombre silence which brooded between these men in trouble. Verne said at parting—and gazing absently at nothing while he spoke: "The tragedy of civilization—of what the world calls civilization!—that is the most terrible of all, Cleland. That is the real and only hell. Not the ruthless eruptions of barbarism; not the momentary resurgence of atavistic violence—of red-blooded rapine and lust—but the ordered, lawful, stealthy, subtle horrors of civilization: they slay men’s souls." "I don’t get you, Verne." "No, Cleland. But somebody else will—somebody else will get me—very soon, now.... Good-bye." A few days later Cleland prowled with Harry Belter, intent upon supper somewhere in the outer marches of the town. For an episode had occurred that shook them both with the most sobering and distressing jar that youth experiences in fullest mental and physical vigour. "I _don’t_ see how a man can kill himself," said Cleland. "I don’t see why he can’t go somewhere else and cure himself of his unhappiness. Travel, change, new faces——" "Perhaps he wants to be rid of faces," muttered Belter. "There are wonderful wildernesses."