"Does David Cairns know Miss Nettleton very well?" Bedient asked, as he was leaving.
She smiled at the question, and was about to reply that they had been right good friends for years, when it occurred that he might have a deeper meaning.
Bedient resumed while she was thinking: "I know that he admires her work and intelligence, but he never spoke to me of any further discoveries. Perhaps he wouldn't…. He's a singularly fine chap, finer than I knew…. I noticed a short essay in your stand that contains a sentence I cannot forget. It was about a rare man who 'stooped and picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of tears.'"
"Browning," she said excitedly.
"Yes…. Good-by and thank you…. To-morrow?"
"Yes."
* * * * *
He left her in the whirl of this new conception. She was taking dinner with David Cairns that night. David, she felt, had arranged this for further urging in the matter of her seeing his friend. And now she smiled at the surprise in store for him; then for a long time, until the yellows and browns were thickly shadowed about her, Beth sat very still, thinking about the Vina Nettleton of yesterday, and the altered and humble David Cairns of the past fortnight…. In the single saying of Bedient's, that he had found Cairns finer than he knew, there was a remarkable, winsome quality for her perception. Bedient had started the revolution which was clearing the inner atmospheres of his friend; and yet, he refused any part.
David took her for dinner to a club far down-town—a dining-room on the twentieth floor, overlooking the rivers and the bay, the shipping and the far shores pointed off with lights…. They waited by a window in the main hall for a moment while a smaller room was being arranged. Forty or more business men were banqueting in a glare of light and glass and red roses—a commercial dinner with speeches. The talk had to do with earnings, per cents, leakages, markets and such matters. The lower lid of many an eye was updrawn in calculation.
Beth shivered, for she saw avarice, cunning, bluff, campaigning with humor and natural forces. "The starry night and the majestic rivers might just as well be plaster-walls," she whispered. "What terrible occupations are these to make our brothers so dull, bald and stodgy-looking?"