Sam Grainger was in the world, somewhere. Married probably, with one of the symphonies, teaching. His myriad hours of violin and oboe practice, piano, harmony, counterpoint, all had been aiming at that. The violin for preference, oboe because good violinists are numerous. With affection that had never perished, Edith thought: _What Sam wants, Sam earns and gets._ She noticed she was thinking in the present tense. Fair enough: it would still be true. Sam Grainger would still be a man dedicated and absorbed, immune to discouragement, too big for distractions. He had not been too seriously distracted by an affair with a redheaded art student. So what has become of the old brownstone front, shabby-sacred rooms, thready hole in the rug, genially silly print of "The Storm"--Mrs. Cardle considered that one real nice for anyone that was artistic-like--and the bed that mysteriously didn't squeak if you lay across it instead of lengthwise? What stills the music, and where are the green shadows of Arcadia? The rooms would have accepted the whispering and secret laughter of a crowd of lovers in seven years, all giggling at sad, vague, moral Mrs. Cardle and that grayish lump of dough, her husband, whose thick delirium of hate for the antique coal furnace in the basement was very nearly a form of love. You saw the Cardles dealing with an ebb and flow of Boston lodgers world without end. But they could have been human and mortal; the brownstone could have yielded to a flat-faced office building. If it had not, though, the center flagstone of the rear yard would look the same in a sluice of rain, the crack in it like the junction of Ohio and Mississippi, seen by young eyes from the window of the third floor back.