His absurd rescue of that wretched doll—why had so trivial an act seemed to shake him out of a long lethargy? The answer leaped up at him almost at once. Not the kindness but the sheer futility of his act—just this was what had struck him as a heartening revelation. He had risked his life for a doll! Jim Bradley had sworn to “get” an enemy, then had gone through flames to save his enemy’s household goods!

For, thinking swiftly, Stacey perceived now that he had not told the truth when he had asserted passionately to Mrs. Latimer that he found the world chaos—with no scheme, nothing. What reason for anger in that? No, as a youth, he had assumed the world to be built upon an agreeable scheme, and then afterward, all unknown to himself, he had fancied it an evil scheme. It was neither. It was what he had insincerely called it—chaos, a grovelling incoherent assemblage of facts. The thought of greed—he had been obsessed by it just because he had seen it as something permanent, consistent—and successful. Pshaw! An ugly thing, greed, but pitiful and futile, like everything else. Where did it get any one? The greedy man was a man struggling for happiness. Well, did he achieve happiness? Hate died out of Stacey. You could not hate what was a failure.

So much he made out in a series of flashes. Much more, that lay behind, was obscurer. He dropped into an arm-chair and sat there, motionless, for a long time, reflecting intensely. Sometimes he would spring to his feet and pace up and down the room for a while, and light a fresh cigarette or pause to finger abstractedly some vase or book, then return to his chair.

It was not, of course, he understood, this one evening’s performance that had shocked him into sanity—or what he hoped was sanity. This long isolation from men, from a world interested only in economics, had calmed him; for in it his youthful gift of fancy, choked back for so long, had been let loose again. You could not choke things back without suffering for it. . . . He had been like a man living in compartments—first in one, then in another. That was wrong. He ought to live wholly, with all of himself. . . . What he had been in his youth—that, too, he still was. Nothing in one ever died.

It was as far as Stacey could get—and this only slowly, with difficulty. But he could, he thought, go back to the real world now and start over again.

CHAPTER XIX

Stacey had left Vernon in December; it was on an afternoon in May that he returned to it. Tulips bloomed gaily in well tended beds along the boulevard at which he gazed from his taxi. A fresh spring smell was in the air. The city was at its best.

Stacey looked at it inquiringly, almost as though it were new to him. And in a sense it was new; for he did not feel toward it in any way that he had felt before. He saw the business buildings standing angularly against the blue sky, the handsome residences of varied architecture, the wide streets that were rivers of motor cars, and he noted, as often, that esthetically the city was faulty and aspiring, and that socially it was energetic and confident. He received again an impression of people striving relentlessly to attain certain things and clinging to them desperately when attained. But he did not feel for these characteristics either admiration or disapproval, affection or distaste. What he did feel was curiosity, because it seemed to him that he knew very little about Vernon really, and an odd touch of pity. For the first time it struck him as rather pathetic to care so hard about motor cars and bathrooms and servants. Here were wealthy men riding triumphantly in imported Rolls-Royces, and poor men riding in Fords, or walking, and hating the rich men. What a to-do! Oh, well, it couldn’t be helped! Stacey supposed. Economics were the order of the day.

Presently he reached his father’s house. “Hello, Parker,” he said to the surprised servant who opened the door. “I’m back, you see,—and without so much as sending a wire. How are you? Mr. Carroll well? Take this bag up to my room for me, will you, please? I certainly do need a bath. Oh, yes, I’ve had lunch, thanks.”

An hour later he strolled down to the dining-room for a whiskey and soda, then, glass in hand, into the library. And there, sitting with a book in a high-backed chair, was Catherine.