This, in the main, I could only stand by and watch, because I was under a cloud. It was a cloud that settled on me heavier and blacker as January passed and February came in. The world-seething had its counterpart in the seething within myself. There were days when my inner anguish was not less frenzied than that of Germany or Russia, in spite of my outward calm. I was still following Vio from house to house, with Stroud as our guide or showman; but the conviction was growing that I must soon have done with it. Not a day nor an hour but seared my consciousness with the fact that he was the man whom Vio loved. "This is not a life," I began to tell myself, bitterly. It became my favorite comment. I made it when I got up in the morning, and when I went to bed at night. I made it when Vio and I engaged in polite conversation, and when she informed me of our engagements for the day. I made it when I entered other people’s drawing-rooms, and when other people entered ours. A life was a reality; a life was work; a life involved above all what Mildred Averill called production. When one didn’t produce there was no place for one. There was no place for me here. With Pelly, Bridget, and the Finn I had touched the genuine, the foundational; in lugging carpets I had done work of which the usefulness was in no wise diminished by the fact that any other man could have done it just as well. In my room with the fungi, on my eighteen dollars a week, I had slept soundly and lived complacently, in harmony with whatever was basic and elemental. It began to dawn in me as a hope that perhaps the windings of the thread of flame would lead me back to what was a life, with a new appreciation of its value. And then one day, when I was on the stairs of our own house, coming down from the third to the second story, I saw Lydia Blair standing on the landing, outside of Vio’s door. Boosey was beside her, and she was taking a parcel from his hands. "Hello, kid," she said, nodding in my direction. "Thought I should see you round here some day. Wonder I didn’t do it before." She addressed Boosey, with another nod toward me. "He and me were at school together. Weren’t we?" she continued, with her enchanting smile, as I reached the lowest step. "Yes," I managed to gasp, "the school of adversity." "And a mighty good school, too, for a sport. Do you know it?" "But, Lydia," I began, "what in the name of—?" "Sh-h! Don’t swear," was all she said, as taking Boosey’s parcel she opened Vio’s door. Going in softly she closed it behind her. Once more Boosey’s expression dramatized my situation. That the master of the house in which he exercised his functions—even such a master as I—should be called "kid" by a girl like Lydia created a social topsyturvydom defying all his principles. For perceptible seconds he stared in an astonishment mingled with disdain, after which he turned on his heel to tell the news in the kitchen.