Quarren was laughing now; and presently a grim concession to humour relaxed the old lady's lips till her fat face creased. "All right," she said; "go and play with the ragged boy around the corner, my son. Then when you're ready come home and get your face washed." "May I come occasionally to chat with you?" "As though you'd do that if you didn't have to!" she exclaimed incredulously. "I think you know better." "No, I don't!" she snapped. "I know men and women; that's all I know. And as you're one of the two species I don't expect anything celestial from you.... And you'd better go, now." She turned over on her pillow with a grunt: Quarren laughed, lifted one of her pudgy and heavily ringed hands from the coverlet, and, still smiling, touched the largest diamond with his lips. "I think," he said, "that you are one of the very few I really like in your funny unreal world.... You're so humanly bad." "What!" she shouted, floundering to a sitting posture. But, looking back at her from the door, he found her grinning. CHAPTER VII Premonitions of spring started the annual social exodus; because in the streets of Ascalon and in the busy ways of Gath spring becomes summer over night and all Philistia is smitten by the sun. And all the meanness and shabbiness and effrontery of the monstrous city, all its civic pretence and tarnished ostentation are suddenly revealed when the summer sun blazes over Ascalon. Wherefore the daintier among the Philistines flee--idler, courtier, dangler and squire of dames--not to return until the first snow-flakes fall and the gray veil of November descends once more over the sorry sham of Ascalon. Out of the inner temple, his ears still ringing with the noise of the drones, Quarren had gone forth. And already, far away in the outer sunshine, he could see real people at work and at play, millions and millions of them--and a real sky overhead edging far horizons. He began real life once more in a bad way, financially; his money being hopelessly locked up in Tappan-Zee Park, a wooded and worthless tract of unimproved land along the Hudson which Quarren had supposed Lester Caldera was to finance for him. Recently, however, that suave young man had smilingly denied making any such promise to anybody; which surprised and disconcerted Quarren who had no money with which to build sewers, roads, and electric plants. And he began to realise how carelessly he had drifted into the enterprise--how carelessly he had drifted into everything and past everything for the last five years. After a hunt for a capitalist among and outside his circle of friends and acquaintances he began to appreciate his own lunacy even more thoroughly.