Deep perplexities wrung his heart when poor souls stood beneath his eyes charged with the smuggling of unlicensed children into the world, children without a passport, outlaw children stamped with the strange label “illegitimate.” They and their importers wore a new cloak in RoBards’ eyes. They had been hitherto ridiculous, or contemptible, or odious. Now he understood what malice there was in the joke that passion had played on them. They were the scorched victims of a fire against which they had taken out no insurance. Like Immy they must have suffered bitter ecstasies of terrified rapture, long vigils of bewilderment, heartbreaks of racking pain, with ludicrous disgrace for their recompense. The Albesons returned from Georgia with such a report as a Northern farmer might have made on Southern soil without the trouble of the journey. RoBards pretended to be satisfied. They found that Immy was not so much improved as they expected—“Kind of peaked and poorly,” Abby complained. Immy came back to town and though she never quite lost that prayer in the eyes known as the “hunted look,” she began to find escape and finally delight in her old gayeties. Then Captain Harry Chalender returned from California on one of the Yankee clippers that were astounding the world by their greyhound speed. It took him barely seventy-six days to sail from San Francisco around the Horn to Sandy Hook, the whole trip needing only seven months. It was indeed the age of restless velocity. Chalender came in as usual with the prestige of broken records. He was rich and full of traveler’s tales of wild justice, Vigilante executions, deluges of gold, fantastic splendors amid grueling hardships. His anecdotes bored RoBards, who listened to them with the poor appetite of a stay-at-home for a wanderer’s brag. But Patty listened hungrily, and Immy was as entranced as Desdemona hearkening to the Moor. Chalender brought Patty a handsome gift and dared to bring a handsomer to Immy. Even his cynical intuitions failed to suspect the education she had undergone, but he noted how much older she was, how wise yet reckless. And she found him perilously interesting beyond any of the young bucks whose farthest voyages were bus rides down Broadway from their boarding houses to their high desks in the counting houses. There was nothing in Chalender’s manner toward Immy that Patty or David could resent when they had their eyes upon him, but he took Immy far from their eyes often. And RoBards was sure that Patty was harrowed not only with a mother’s anxiety for a daughter, but with an elder beauty’s resentment at a younger’s triumph. On the next New Year’s Day Chalender came to the RoBards home late of a snow-clouded afternoon. He explained that he had begun up north and worked his way downtown; and St. John’s Park was the last word to the south. This led Patty to remind RoBards with a sharp look that she had been begging him to move up where the people were.