To separate a man from the woman he loves, however unwisely, has some of the same disadvantages as offering a bribe—one respects the other person less in proportion as one succeeds. What, Ben said to himself, could he urge against a girl he did not know? Yet, on the other hand, if he had known her, his objections would have seemed regrettably personal. Either way, it was difficult to know what to say. He wondered what Cord had said, and smiled to think that here was one object for which he and Cord were co-operating—only Cord would never believe it. That was one trouble with capitalists—they always thought themselves so damned desirable. And Ben did not stop to inquire how it was that capitalists had gained this impression. On the pier he looked about for David, but there was no David. Of course the boy had overslept, or hadn’t received his telegram—Ben said this to himself, but somehow the vision of David comfortably asleep in a luxurious bed in the Cords’s house irritated him. His meditations were broken in upon by a negro boy with an open hack, who volunteered to “take him up for fifty cents.” It sounded reasonable. Ben got in and they moved slowly down the narrow pier, the horses’ hoofs clumping lazily on the wooden pavement. Turning past the alley of Thames Street, still alight at three o’clock in the morning, Ben stopped at the suggestion of his driver and left his bag at a hotel, and then they went on up the hill, past the tower of the Skeleton in Armor, past old houses with tall, pillared porticoes, reminiscent of the days when the South patronized Newport, and turned into Bellevue Avenue—past shops with names familiar to Fifth Avenue, past a villa with bright-eyed owls on the gateposts, past many large, silent houses and walled gardens. The air was very cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path. Then suddenly the whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in “Faust” when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the hydrangea bushes. They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief—so small that the lighted windows were plainly visible from the road. “Stop,” said Ben to his driver. He had suddenly realized how long it must be before he could rouse the Cord household.