He worked hard. He took an occasional harbor sail in the evening. But the fragor of the beaches was foretasted by the packed, chattering masses on the boats. So that there was very little harbor and much intimate association with nursing mothers, with romping boys, with clamorous, obtrusive minstrels, with beery men. The water lay below all this, a satined stretch, ruffled by rude craft, faintly musical and faintly blue and faintly perfumed with the salt. But the irrepressible boat shut it out for the most part. About it, there was naught faint or vague. Quincy would sit in the stern and watch the huddled buildings of lower Manhattan draw together as he drew away. What an eloquent memorial they were--these unkempt buildings--to a vast energy run wild, arrogant, lacking a soul to guide it. He knew the scene’s repute for beauty. But he did little more than shrug his shoulders. New York’s aesthetic he had long since recognized as an uncritical sentimentalism. A mass of ill-related, misshapen, meaningless structures prodding the air with imitation cathedral towers or Egyptian pyramids or fortress battlements could not be beautiful. Yet, as they died away and the blue mist of the harbor thickened and the myriad gold lights came out, shooting their gleam into an overtone, and the water’s murmur turned to a sheen of silver, and the whistles of the water-craft thridded the vagueness with their sharp reports, Quincy changed his mind. The City was now a ghost looming away, a thing of uncanny life, vibrant and portentous;--a thing of beauty. Quincy went back to that first visit of discovery when he had come down, thrilled with adventure, from his college and walked Brooklyn Bridge. The City then had not needed the veil of night and the garlands of the water to make it beautiful. It had not changed. He had. Was it for the better? It was a heavy summer. Quincy declined his two weeks’ vacation, earning by this display of his heart’s emptiness, the praise of his employer. Week-ends, he spent at home. But they did not rest him. And the little copse in the rear of the house where he had once made revel, was a mockery. The willow tree through whose fingers the sun fell each day became a burden upon Quincy’s sight. It hurt him. He avoided it. He remained with his family. He bathed with them, motored with them, sat on the veranda, doing naught with them. Adelaide had never found him so pliant, so agreeable, so heart-wrenchingly sad. But it was too late to alter the course of this petty tragedy. They were side by side, needing each other, as they had always done, starving and wasting away. They had no hands to clasp each other with, no arms to hold with. But they had breasts, hearts--vainly, since their lips were silent and their words did not concord. * * * * * And so, came the fall.