So came the New Year, while the City revelled. And then, at last this holiday of suffering was over. Jonas was gone. Quincy returned to his room. And it had no positive reaction upon him. Simply, he was glad that certain things were gone. Passively, he accepted the present. He entered upon a period of calm, of seeming apathy. But this welcome state was destined to prove meretricious. Quincy had not really attained serenity or resignation, after his turbulent experience. His soul, rebuffed and bruised, was not yet content to retire within itself and glut its own demands. There was a long road, ere this, for Quincy. For the present, unconsciously of course, he delighted in his breathing space and with great readiness forgot the past with its poignant measure of prophetic warning. But, in truth, his soul was merely crouching ere it leaped out once more. It had not been discouraged. Within it, was too much vitality for that. It was lying low, only to attempt a higher flight, once a new object had been scented. When Quincy was thirteen, he discovered Rhoda. Jonas was still away--at college. Rhoda had done with school and the idea of college for a girl was not part of the mental outfit which the Burt family had brought along from Harriet, Long Island. Adelaide approached sixteen. Her educational trials were not yet over. Marsden was now literally a man. A certain surface of his mind had grown hard and polished, so that he was clever and ingenious; able to make bearable the largely mental life to which his body had condemned him. The depths of his mind had died, so that he was bitter in spirit, visionless, and well nigh content. He derived the same satisfaction from his dominion in the household that a normal man might glean from his part in a community. He drew joy from his ability to judge aloof; he created a sort of life from the business of poising the lives of others. Some time, he had been watching Quincy. But the period of their talks was not yet ripe. For the present, he was a cold, hard, cynical obstruction upon Quincy’s path--a creature that could sear and wither with a word, an intimate that exploited his foreknowledge with the evil unconcern of an outsider. Quincy hated him, feared him. For he was powerful beyond his parents when it became his listless fancy to ordain. And his mother loved him with a warmth that was thrice cursed, since it withdrew a part of her from Quincy, since it served as a common interest to veer her toward his father and since in the last fact, the love she did bestow upon him seemed somehow tainted and imperfect. Marsden had not yet been _created_ in Quincy’s life. He stood there as a bitter, impersonal condition--an element, a natural detail. In this way, a pagan peasant might regard a mountain that stood north above his land--the womb of storms, the treasury of frosts, a thing under no circumstance to be explored.