No use your coming back until you are quite ready, Jim. There’s nothing for you to do. I’ve taken a studio and apartment with Helen Davis, the animal sculptor. I don’t yet know just what I shall do. I’m likely to try several things before I know what I ought to stick to. Don’t feel any absurd sense of responsibility for me. That would be too silly. Feel free to remain abroad as long as it suits you. I also feel absolutely free to go and come as I please. That’s the best basis for our friendship, Jim, and, in fact, the necessary and vital basis. My affection is unaltered, but, somehow, it has been such a long time that you seem almost unreal to me. He did not sail at once. After all, in the face of such an unmistakable declaration of independence, it did not seem worth while for him to arouse himself from the golden lethargy of enchantment and break the spell of Europe which held him content, amid the mellow ripeness of her capitals and the tinted splendour of her traditions. He wrote frequently for a few months. Then his letters lagged. Once his pretty Countess had warned him that, for an American, Europe was merely the school-room but his own country was the proper and only place for creative labour. He remembered this at intervals, a little uneasy, a trifle conscious-stricken because he shrank from making an end to preparation—because he still loitered, disinclined to break the golden web and return to the clear, shadowless skies and the pitiless sun of the real world where he belonged, and where alone, he knew, was the workshop for which he had been so leisurely preparing. Then the shock came—the bolt out of the blue. The cablegram said: I married Oswald Grismer this morning. STEPHANIE. *CHAPTER XVI* He sailed in April. When he sailed, he knew he would not come back for many years, if ever. His business here was done, the dream of Europe ended. The cycle of Cathay awaited him in all its acrid crudity. Yes, the golden web was rent, torn across, destroyed. The shock to his American mind left nothing of the lotus eater in him. He was returning where he belonged. Married! Steve married! To Oswald Grismer, who, save as a schoolboy and later in college, was a doubtful and unknown quantity to him. He had never known Grismer well. Since their schoolboy differences, they had been good enough friends when thrown together, which had been infrequently. He had no particular liking for Grismer, no dislike. Grismer had been a clever, adroit, amusing man in college, generally popular, yet with no intimacies, no close friends. As for Steve, he never dreamed that Stephanie would do such a thing. It was so damnably silly, so utterly unthinkable a thing to do.