Westguard said: "They've gradually been getting a strangle-hold on him. Women are crazy about that sort of man--with his good looks and good humour and his infernally easy way of obliging a hundred people at once.... Look back a few years! Before he joined that whipper-snapper junior club he was full of decent ambition, full of go, unspoiled, fresh from college and as promising a youngster as anybody ever met. Where is his ambition now? What future has he?--except possibly to marry a million at forty-five and settle down with a comfortable grunt in the trough. It's coming, I tell you. Look what he was four years ago--a boy with clear eyes and a clear skin, frank, clean set, clean minded. Look at him now--sallow, wiry, unprofitably wise, rangé, disillusioned--oh, hell! they've mauled him to a shadow of a rag!" Lacy lighted another cigarette and winked at O'Hara. "Karl's off again," he said. "Now we're going to get the Bible and the Sword for fair!" "Doesn't everybody need them both!" said Westguard, smiling. Then his heavy features altered: "I care a good deal for Dick Quarren," he said. "That's why his loose and careless financial methods make me mad--that's why this loose and careless transformation of a decent, sincere, innocent boy into an experienced, easy-going, cynical man makes me tired. I've got to stand for it, I suppose, but I don't want to. He's a gifted, clever, lovable fellow, but he hasn't any money and any right to leisure, and these people are turning him into one of those dancing things that leads cotillions and arranges tableaux, and plays social diplomat and forgets secrets and has his pockets full of boudoir keys--good Lord! I hate to say it, but they're making a tame cat of him--they're using him ignobly, I tell you--and that's the truth--if he had a friend with courage enough to tell him! I've tried, but I can't talk this way to him." There was a silence: then O'Hara crossed one lank leg over the other, gingerly, and contemplated his left shoe. "Karl," he said, "character never really changes; it only develops. What's born in the cradle is lowered into the grave, as some Russian guy said. You're a writer, and you know what I say is true." "Granted. But Quarren's character isn't developing; it's being stifled, strangled. He could have been a professional man--a lawyer, and a brilliant one--or an engineer, or a physician--any old thing. He's in real estate--if you can call it that. All right; why doesn't he _do_ something in it? I'll tell you why," he added, angrily answering his own question; "these silly women are turning Quarren's ambition into laziness, his ideals into mockery, his convictions into cynicism----" He stopped short. The door opened, and Quarren sauntered in.