No! There was enjoyment in this coolth, hope in the waves’ music, health in the easy, limbered kiss of the sky and the water. The waves slumbered in their bronze rings, topped with sapphire. Beyond was a streak of opal--about a mass of murmurous emerald slaked with fire. How unutterably beautiful was this! He did not wish to be below the waves. It could not be so beautiful when one failed to catch the changes of the sun on the waves’ surfaces. He thought of life. Were its beauties also the sun’s and the sky’s gleam on it? Was it also an opaque mass--smothering, colorless, eyeless--below its surface? The ocean was dead without the wind and the air, the elemental fires and their tides. It was really separate from these. Was this true of life? Was this true of him? No!--the sun had been a part of him. And if the wind had not, why had he understood its words so well? Desperately, he would cling to his conviction, that though the sea was a subtle, mighty mirror, he was a part of the far things of beauty that swept and flamed and trilled above them both. Unto the last, he would cling to this. And a man clinging lives. * * * * * Sarah was back in her home. Quincy was back in the City. The first evening which the much-affaired young lady found for him, he went to see Clarice. She had to break a dance engagement in order to fit him in, at all. This gladdened Quincy. But the evening was none the less a failure. Clarice seemed mostly the self she showed to the world. Her talk was practical and hard. Within, the cause of this was solely her irritation at Quincy’s supine acceptance of just that self. She longed to have him crush it away--in his arms if need be. So she flaunted it in his face. She meant to goad Quincy on. But she succeeded merely in dejecting him. He was past fighting the van-guards of the City. Its body had annihilated him. He needed help, revivement--not taunting. But Clarice was not yet inclined, even had she felt this, to go so far. Wherefore, Quincy went away, resolved not to come back too soon again. Meantime, December crept along on its frozen feet--crept along half of its ironic passage. Frost and the blare of lights, frost and the heat of music, frost and the fluency of crowds. A month of paradox is December in Manhattan. Quincy was in no mood for it, even as for its offshoot, the methods of Clarice. And now, the New Year shook out the wrinkles from its frills and made announcement of its hilarious advent. Quincy decided to stay alone--not to go home, not to make an engagement. To stay really alone among the millions.