Putting aside for the present all thought of the coming summer, Truesdale set himself to the formation of a circle. He had gone away as a boy and had come back as a young man. He had grown beyond his old acquaintances, he thought, and apart from them--of which last there could be no doubt on either side; and it struck him that the easiest and simplest thing to do would be to drop them all and to start afresh. To drop everybody and to start afresh was something he was completely habituated to. He did it through the year at intervals of from three to six months; during the busy summer season among the Swiss pensions he had done it once every fortnight, or oftener. His nature was full of adaptability, receptivity, fluidity; he made friends everywhere he went, and snatched up acquaintances at every corner. Among the first in his new batch were Theodore Brower and Arthur Paston. They were both older than he, but he declared, _net_, that his non-travelled compatriots of his own age were impossible. These two new acquaintances he appeared to like equally well; and Jane, whose kindling ambition had devoted her brother to a brilliant social career, and whose forenoon with Mrs. Bates had done little enough to quench the mounting flame, wondered how such an augury was to be read; for Brower was wholly out of society, while Paston was understood to be (save for some slight but inevitable business entanglements) wholly in it. She decided, finally, that, as Truesdale had met Brower in their own house--involuntarily, as it were--while he had met Paston outside (as a result, inferentially, of his own endeavors and advances), the brilliant future of her brother was in no danger of being compromised. Then she restored the just balance between the two by the thought that Truesdale had taken very kindly to Theod--to Mr. Brower, after all; much more so than Rosy, whose sauciness (she could think of no other word) Jane found herself unable to forgive. Theodore Brower was some ten years older than Truesdale. His hair was beginning to retreat before his advancing forehead, and about his eyes were coming to appear those lines proper to the man who is in business for himself and pretty largely absorbed in it. He had a pair of shrewd but kindly brown eyes and a straightforward and serious manner. He held his hand more or less on the pulsing actualities of the town, and at one time or another he took Truesdale to most of his clubs--the Crepuscular, the Consolation, the Simplicity, the Universe. At most of these they dined moderately and discussed immoderately, except at the Simplicity, whose avowed object was to free Man from the tyranny of Things. There they discussed and did not dine at all.