married three times. If it wasn't for his damned
infirmities he'd probably marry again. Looking for something. What was
it the old man had kept looking for? As if there was in existence a
concrete gift to be drawn from life. A blithering, water-eyed optimist
to the end, he'd die with a prayer of thankfulness and gratitude.

Thus innocuously abstract, moving in the doldrum which sometimes
surrounded him after his day's work, he turned into the boulevard along
the lake. The day grew abruptly fresher here. An arc of blue sky rising
from the east flung a great curve over the building tops. Dorn paused
before the window of a Japanese art shop and stared at a bulbous wooden
god stoically contemplating his navel.

During his walks through the streets he sometimes met people he knew.
This time a young woman appeared at the window beside him. He recognized
her with elation. His thought gave him an index of her ... Rachel
Laskin, curious girl ... makes me talk well ... appreciative ... unusual
eyes.

CHAPTER IV

They walked together down the avenue. Dorn felt a return of interest in
himself. Introspection bored him. His insincerity made self thought
meaningless. Listeners, however, revived him. As they walked he caught
occasional glimpses of his companion--vivid eyes, dark lips, a cool,
shadow-tinted face that belonged under exotic trees; a morose little
girl insanely sensitive and with a dream inside her. She admired him; or
at least she admired his words, which amounted to the same thing. Once
before she had said, "You are different." As usual he held his cynicism
in abeyance before flattery. People who thought him different pleased
him. It gave them a certain intellectual status in his eyes.

His thought, as he talked, busied itself with images of her. She gave
him a sense of dark waters hidden from the moon--a tenuous fugitive
figure in the pretty clamor of the bright street.

"You remind me," he was saying, "of a nymph among dowagers and
frightened to death. There's really nothing to be frightened of, unless
you prefer fear to other more tangible emotions."

She nodded her head. He recalled that the gesture had puzzled him at
first. It gave an eager assent to his words that surprised him. It
pretended that she had understood something he had not said, something
that lay beneath his words. Dorn pointed at the women moving by them.

"Poems in shoe craft, tragedies in ankles and melodramas in legs," he
announc