et her go. She was the only person to whom he had talked
about his illness who had been frank and honest with him, who had
looked at him with eyes that concealed nothing. When he broke the
news of his condition to his partners that morning, they shut him
off as if he were uttering indecent ravings. All day they had met
him with a hurried, abstracted manner. McQuiston and Wade went out
to lunch together, and he knew what they were thinking, perhaps
talking, about. Wanning had brought into the firm valuable business,
but he was less enterprising than either of his partners.

III

In the early summer Wanning's family scattered. Roma swallowed her
pride and sailed for Genoa to visit the Contessa Jenny. Harold went
to Cornish to be in an artistic atmosphere. Mrs. Wanning and
Florence took a cottage at York Harbor where Wanning was supposed to
join them whenever he could get away from town. He did not often get
away. He felt most at ease among his accustomed surroundings. He
kept his car in the city and went back and forth from his office to
the club where he was living. Old Sam, his butler, came in from
Orange every night to put his clothes in order and make him
comfortable.

Wanning began to feel that he would not tire of his office in a
hundred years. Although he did very little work, it was pleasant to
go down town every morning when the streets were crowded, the sky
clear, and the sunshine bright. From the windows of his private
office he could see the harbor and watch the ocean liners come down
the North River and go out to sea.

While he read his mail, he often looked out and wondered why he had
been so long indifferent to that extraordinary scene of human
activity and hopefulness. How had a short-lived race of beings the
energy and courage valiantly to begin enterprises which they could
follow for only a few years; to throw up towers and build
sea-monsters and found great businesses, when the frailest of the
materials with which they worked, the paper upon which they wrote,
the ink upon their pens, had more permanence in this world than
they? All this material rubbish lasted. The linen clothing and
cosmetics of the Egyptians had lasted. It was only the human flame
that certainly, certainly went out. Other things had a fighting
chance; they might meet with mishap and be destroyed, they might
not. But the human creature who gathered and shaped and hoarded and
foolishly loved these things, he had no chance--absol