Those pulley layouts have to be fixed up sometime. What can you say about a pulley--what _can_ you say? “The United Steel Frame Pulley--Oh Man, There's a Hog for Work!” Oliver turns the cheap phrase in his mind, hating its shoddiness, hating the fact that such shoddiness is the only stuff with which he can deal. Sanely considered, he supposes he hasn't any business using up a month's meagre savings and three small checks for poems that he has hoarded since April in going out to St. Louis Friday. Mr. Alley wasn't too pleased with letting him take Saturday and half Monday off to do it, too. But then there was that telegram ten days ago. “I'd give anything in the world if we could only see each other--” and after other letters unsatisfactorily brief, the letter that came Monday “I have such grand news, Ollie dear, at least it may be grand if it works out--but oh, dear, I do want to see you about it without tangling it up in letters that don't really explain. Can't you make it--even a few hours would be long enough to talk it all over--and I do so want to see you and really talk! Please wire me, if you can.” Grand news--what kind he wondered--and dully thought that he couldn't see her, of course, and then suddenly knew that he must. After all, there didn't seem to be much use in saving for the sake of saving when all the saving you could possibly do didn't bring you one real inch nearer to what you really wanted. _Apres moi le deluge--apres ca le deluge_--it might even come to that this time, they were both so tired--and he viewed the prospect as a man mortally hurt might view the gradual failing of sun and sky above him, with hopelessness complete as a cloud in that sky, but with heart and brain too beaten now to be surprised with either agony or fear. They must see each other--they were neither of them quiet people who could love forever at a distance without real hope. Great Lord, if he and Nancy could ever have one definite basis to work on, one definite hope of money in the future no matter how far off that was--But the present uncertainty--They couldn't keep on like this--no two people in the world could be expected to keep on. Nancy. He is seeing Nancy, the way she half-lifts her head when she has been teasing and suddenly becomes remorseful and wants him to know how much she does love him instead. XIII A hot night in the Pullman---too hot to sleep in anything but a series of uneasy drowsings and wakings. Smell of blankets and cinders and general unwashedness--noise of clacketing wheels and a hysterical whistle--anyhow each sweaty hour brings St. Louis and Nancy nearer. St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, says the sleepless racket of the wheels, but the peevish electric fan at the end of the corridor keeps buzzing to itself like a fly caught in a trap. “And then I got married you see--and then I got married you see--and when you get married you aren't a free lance--you aren't a free lance--you're _settled_!”