Clarice seemed so intact, so right! Quincy felt disgust at his own lack of measure before this girl. She was younger than himself in years; he had branded her, and, he was sure, once turned her down as a hard flirt. Yet, despite her lack of mind and of experience, how ably she had mastered her environment compared to him; how well turned all the swirling things about her to her advantage, to her own channels, in contrast to his floundering and illusions and utterly unformed bravado! For what could he think of his new armor and his new creeds when a few talks with Clarice disintegrated them, sent them pell-mell, haphazard like the little evil live things seen through a microscope in a glass of dirty water? He thought of Adelaide and his behavior there came to him more nearly in its proper light. He had never faced her, either. But since she was tender and soft and inefficient, he had been able to fend her off. That was not prowess. He felt sorry for her ineptitude; angry at her for not being able better to present her case since it was worthy and since he had need of it. Adelaide, self-asserting, might have saved him from these pitiful, merciless results of a few encounters outside the Rut. He blamed her for it. And once again the old vision of Marsden came to him--as if it had been new--of Marsden the unclean thing, and of the City that was his temple. But all of these things were uncomfortable and fleeting as yet. For both reasons they must not seem important; they must not seem to last. Here, before him was Clarice, looking at him, delving within him doubtless, for the causes of his silence. What if she were to find them! Quincy clasped his hands, and let them fall cavalierly to his knees. He was in danger--that part of him that was the City’s thing. So the City came to his rescue. It supplied him with a smile, a fund of evasive talk, an armor for fencing himself away. And so, with sick foreknowledge how, he made his slippery escape. The rest of the evening was a duel--her knowing thrusts, his parryings that grew forever more self-conscious, more defensive, more half-hearted. II