He found a fund of disillusion in Clarice. Bravely and openly she despised the atmosphere she lived in. He was afraid to. For with him, to despise it, was to stop breathing it. For her, this did not seem to follow. Clarice was not alone quite sure that she would persevere in this land whose mockeries she knew; she was willing to. And she gleaned a constructive aim for her energies in knocking down as she ran along. Here was a mystery for Quincy. The strange admixture of tenderness and flint, joy and detachment, which Clarice displayed, was unknown to him. Willingly, he would have stated that such a girl could not in reality exist. Yet there she was--intellectually radical, emotionally set and conserved--more than existing, living with a clear efficiency and a firm conscience! Nothing she gave him, Adelaide could not have given him to know. But his spirit’s pores were open here. With his unfortunate sister all of him was shut and rigid. That was why these talks counted more. Clarice knew Herbert Lamory slightly. She had never asked him to call. “He is pretty empty, I think,” she said. “When I talk with him, it is as if I were talking with a glazed terra-cotta brick on the wall of some one of a million buildings in New York. He fits in just so unobtrusively.” Quincy realized that this was true, and that, because of this very fitness and his desire to emulate it, he had aligned himself with Herbert. She went on: “I really can’t understand your devotion to him. You say you’re chums? It reminds me a bit--” she smiled, “of the devotion of a man in the sea for a piece of sea-weed that happens to be floating.” “A man in the sea is out of his element,” protested Quincy. “Precisely,” she was content with saying. And as he pondered, there came a pause. Clarice had something to say upon the subject of failure. Quincy had broached it. “Think of all those young fellows in our office,” he exclaimed, “and as many more in any other office. How few of them could ever, by reason of actual physical conditions rise from the menial places they now hold! After all, each office has only a few heads. And twenty years from now there won’t be enough new offices to give high places to all these men.” “No,” said Clarice. “But don’t you think very probably, that only those who really _fit_ will get ahead? I don’t think it is brains or hard work or even luck that makes men succeed in New York. It’s _fitting-in_.” “Well, can’t that be learned?”