"Is it about the Spirit Light competition, Vanny?" Mrs. Scrimser asked; and Pearl ejaculated: "Father may be late, but I guess he'll be here before Vance condescends to tell us!"

"Tell us what?" Vance's father questioned, banging the front door shut, and dropping his outer garments in the ingle-nook before joining his family.

"His news from New York," Pearl snapped.

Lorin Weston came in, casting his cautious tired eyes about the room. His son suddenly noticed how much older and thinner he looked; his dapper business suit hung on him. "Well, what's your news, son?"

"I've got a job in New York," Vance announced, hardly believing that the voice he heard was his own.

"Feels … good … here … after … Crampton… ." the marionette crooned from its corner.

On the train to New York Vance had the same sense of detachment as when he had gone thither three years before. Again it was as though, in leaving his home, he took his whole self with him, like a telephone receiver unhooked and carried on a long cord into another room. The years at Euphoria had taught him something, he supposed; he felt infinitely older, felt mature, "hardboiled" as the new phrase was: he smiled with pity at the defenceless infant he had been when he made his first assault on the metropolis.

But how had the process of maturing been effected? He had felt himself an alien from the moment of his return to Euphoria; there had been no retightening of loosened links, no happy boyish sense of homecoming. He could imagine that a fellow might feel that, getting back to one of those old Lorburn houses, so impregnated with memories, so thick with tangible tokens of the past; but his own recollections could only travel back through a succession of new houses, each one a little larger and with a better bathroom and a neater garage than the last, but all without any traces of accumulated living and dying: shells shed annually, almost, like a crab's. He even felt, as he sat in the spick-and-span comfort of Mapledale Avenue, the incongruity of an old man's presuming to die there. "Seems like there's no past here but in the cemeteries," he mused one day, looking pityingly at his grandfather… .