“What a wise head!” he said, smiling.
“I’m right; I know I’m right.”
“Yes, you are,” he said solemnly. “I don’t know how you guess my failings, but you guess them remarkably well. All right; I’ll appoint you my guardian, and I’ll promise to obey.”
“Then don’t show your sketches to any one—oh, Tootles and King, if you want, but not to the others—the ones you want to—to throw down and climb over.”
“Why, I believe you’re just as savage as I am!” he said, laughing at her conclusion.
“I am; I am!” she cried, in high excitement, and the point lay settled. She was back in her mood of riotous gaiety.
For the rest of the day he watched her, puzzled and fascinated, drawn to her by all his senses, finding her a hundred times more tantalizing, perplexing, and desirable than ever before, astounded at the whirl of spirits into which she drove without a pause. The next day, while he was still waiting what mood would dominate her, she announced abruptly that the time had come to depart. Then he understood.
It was far into November when they returned to the Arcade, and the city was the city of the approaching winter, vibrant, stirring, and electric. He felt a new eagerness of the imagination, a confidence buoyed up on waves of energy that seemed to urge him joyfully back into the arena of conflict.
When they had taken a taxi and were caught in the full crush of thronged avenues, he drew forward on his seat, leaning eagerly toward the window. The city was there, waiting for him, with its variegated flashes of life, its movements of skyscrapers and clouds, its streaming multitudes and, in the shifting current, faces, fragments of human light and shade. These scattered details, which once had been meaningless and confusion on confusion, had a new significance, brought together and made comprehensible by deep, underlying impulses, moving and massed according to the same immutable laws, that flung giant rocks, inscrutable and calm amid the shifting seasons that overran them only to die away. In this opposition of fashioned cliffs and drifting tides of men he felt a kinship with the sea-swept reaches he had known, a unity in significance which surprised him, where he had expected disillusionment, and, drinking in greedily thus the richness of the thronged world which called to him, he realized, with a sudden joy, that his true work lay ahead of him.