Marsden had been aware of his desire, exerted through all his youth, to erect idealities against life’s barrenness and to feed on these. Marsden seemed to assume that, of course, such a behavior was both bad and foolish; that life’s barrenness was the sole thing to acknowledge, that feeding on any ideality, or any ideality on which to feed, was adjunct to the name of “ninny.” The boy bowed--asserting that he had changed. “I think you have,” said Marsden. And Quincy was gratified once more. It was now, that the sensation and the delight of emptiness were furthered. “What is the use,” Marsden rhetorically asked, “what is the use of blinking the facts?--Here we are, having to feed ourselves and get some pleasure out of the world. If you deny the world it will deny you, and that means--wipe you out. If you please it, it will give you a little something. Of course, even then, it will cheat you and finally run you through the shoulder-blades. But if you don’t please it, it won’t give you even the little that cheating you implies. It won’t give you even the breathing-space before the dagger-thrust. It will not let you come to life, at all. And then, what have you got? Dreams;--a handful of shoddy, aged make-believes that will poison you with their mold and rust.” All this--and more of the sort--proved Marsden’s new friendship for his brother. Quincy was very glad to have it. It occurred to him that here was a cripple happier than he had been! a cripple, therefore, to be emulated! He wanted to be happy. He had not been happy long on the old path. If dry bones and a bent back pointed an easier way than the glad promptings of his own rhythmic body, then manifestly the impellings of free muscles and of eyes that danced in the sun must be denied. It might seem natural to find gaiety through them and the old plays that he had undertaken. But it was not so. Wiser it was, then, to incline before the successful mandate of dry bones and a bent back. Moreover, in this new atmosphere of business, Marsden seemed to fit in as less of an anomaly, more of a norm. There was a somewhat all about him kindred to this cripple with his aging head and his brittle, tottering body and his cavernous hot eyes. Marsden appeared to him almost as a symbol and a prophet. If he accepted the City, it was an apt step to accept him. And if he went about in the City extolling its nature, denying its deformities, then Marsden also ceased to be a sickly monster. To this Quincy had brought himself--to this brink of assimilation. In his old world, the sun’s slant through the trees had been the morning’s journalistic headline, a tender man’s word the affair of state, his own surviving spirit the season’s crop;--there, Marsden had indeed been a poor, pitiable outcast, a grotesque denial of the world’s lilt, to be avoided and to be feared. But now it was different. Marsden’s limbs seemed no longer an exception to the world’s meaning--which had grown also lame and palsied.