"Take-in!" cried Roger. "It's easy enough to be taken in if you want to be taken in--if you lend yourself to being taken in!" His father gave a long sigh and dropped a helpless hand on his desk. Truesdale looked into vacancy and gave a long, low whistle. "And there you have it!" ended Roger. "You have lifted off the cover and looked in. Do you want to go deeper? You'll find a hell-broth--thieves, gamblers, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, saloon-keepers, aldermen, heelers, justices, bailiffs, policemen--and all concocted for us within a short quarter of a century." He drew his hands across each other. "I've never felt so cheap and filthy in my life." Truesdale made no further inquiries about the Van Horns. His fastidious nature shrank back from all these malodorous actualities. He added his own footprints to those which already defaced the map lying on the floor, and asked about that. "You're interesting yourself in buying land, I imagine." "In selling," replied Roger, curtly. David Marshall leaned laboriously over the arm of his chair with the intention, perhaps, of crowding the crumpled map into his waste-basket. Instead, he gave it several neat and careful folds and thrust it abstractedly into one of his pigeon-holes. It found place alongside of a bill for doctor's services handed in that morning. A porter who had fallen down three floors of the elevator shaft had been attended by one of his own friends. The bill was exorbitant--everybody concerned knew that. But it was rather less than a probable award for damages--everybody knew that, too. The excess was to be shared, of course, between doctor and patient. "Was there anything special?" his father asked presently, with a wan and dejected glance towards his younger son. "If not, I think I'll put on my things and go home. I don't quite feel myself today." "Perhaps you'd better," recommended Roger, taking the roll of maps under his arm. "I'll have these distributed from my office during the week." "No, nothing special," answered Truesdale; "I just happened in. And I think," he added to himself, "that I had better lose no time in happening out. The idea of my running up against such a tar-kettle as this! Pouf!" As he went out he passed along the front of Belden's desk. Belden himself sat there attended, with the sort of deferential familiarity that suggests the confidential clerk, by the Swiss, the Alsacian, or whatever else, who on a previous occasion had moved the curiosity of Bingham. This man caught sight of Truesdale as he passed, and gave him an instant glance of recognition. He at once bowed his head over Belden's desk, so as to hide his face among its papers. "A gentleman to see you sir?" he suggested with a magnificent readiness. Belden raised his own head and met the careless nod of the passing Truesdale with a forbidding frown. "No, he doesn't want to see me. And I don't want to see him," he muttered in a lower tone.