Mrs. Deane spoke: “Why don’t you young people run along upstairs?”
Automatically, Lois, Miss Tibbetts and the two boys rose from their chairs. It was as if they were being thrust away by a sated creature. David could feel the swift rushing of the current of attention from him. The single eye was turned away: the single word knew him not. He was nothing.
He saw these men and women, sure, satisfied; he felt a certain cruelty in their assurance and in their satisfaction. He was closer to the girls. Muriel had not budged from her seat. In Duer was a certain mingling of movement and of motive. Duer was changing his status. Muriel had changed already. She had qualified and been absorbed. She was one of the possessors, one with this generation which had achieved. Duer was on the way. David saw something like a royal whim in the intensity of the brief interest of these elders. They had looked at him as possible food, as a possible new adhesion to their body. They had not remotely thought of him as a separate human being with heart and mind and soul of his own. In a way poignant, however vague, David felt this, felt further the meaning of their swift disposal after the appeasement of interest. Here, at last, he discerned a Group. He knew that in its elemental consciousness he must be either a good thing for its increase, or a bad thing altogether....
Upstairs another sudden shift in mood and stress.
Duer all at once was middle-aged and weightily silent. He looked on the two girls with a forebearing reticence. He had left a part of himself—a longing part—downstairs. A part of the group downstairs—the complacent part—he was trying sturdily to carry on.
Lois and his sister were hard to impress. Their bright indifference outshone his drab and manufactured ease. A certain sublime comfort lay beneath Duer’s manifest disapproval of their gayety. It said: “Time is with me. Wait until you are women, as I am a man. My way wins.”
Lois placed Miss Tibbetts before him with a ceremonial air.
“Fay is my very best friend. So you two must be friends, too: for my sake.... Kiss!”
He obeyed joyously. He liked the spirit of this. He felt its unregeneracy. Already, though he knew it not, he was arrayed against the informing tide of this life about him. And when he was near a girl whom he liked, much of David’s inhibitions melted away.
Duer made his advance. He needed an ally against the flippancy of these girls, these girls about whom he would have said: “They know nothing about life: they know nothing about Business.”