After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to occupy Sue’s mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked, Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed the point. She had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children had fallen singly upon Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had depended upon her doing just that. He had come as a boy to his mother wanting to talk of himself and she had wept at the thought of the childless wife and had told him how to set about making her happy. “Well, I will set about it,” he thought on the train coming home; “I will find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me. Then I also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for a way of life.” One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled indeed with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through the evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social service. “I have been thinking things out,” she said, her eyes shining. “We must not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We must together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind. We must make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social uplift.” Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms of clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned that evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded another idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming to him, he turned to her smiling. “It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things,” he said.