For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall. In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer’s talk, and in Chicago and New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long street he thought that he did understand. Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face. On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman, standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called softly, and turning he went to her. “I am not a customer,” he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands, “but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that I won’t get to thinking.” “You’re a queer bird,” said the woman, taking his arm. “What have you done that you don’t want to think?” Sam said nothing. “There’s a place over there,” she said, pointing to the lighted front of a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows. Sam kept on walking. “If you do not mind,” he said, “I will pick the place. I want to buy a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook in the kitchen.” They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still waiting. “I thought maybe it was a stall,” she said.