It was past one in the morning when Vance sprang to his feet in comic anguish. "Oh, say, what about my last train home?" They all laughed, and Tarrant said, glancing at his watch: "No hurry, my boy—it left an hour ago, and there's no other till six-thirty," whereat the group about the fire vanished from Vance's eyes, displaced by Laura Lou's white face peering through her window into the icy darkness… . "What a place to live in, anyhow!" he thought, exasperated at being thus forced back into reality; and when the party finally broke up he accepted Eric Rauch's invitation to go on with him to "The Loafers' Club," an all-night affair where they could talk and drink till the dismal hour when the first train started for Paul's Landing. After all, it wasn't Vance's fault if he had to live in the wilderness, and the minute he'd cleared off that Hayes debt he was going to bring Laura Lou back to New York, where there were people a fellow could talk to, and who understood what he was trying for. It filled him with sudden despair to think that of all he had heard and said that evening not a syllable would mean anything to his wife.

Chapter 2

At the "Loafers'" Vance had felt the relief of a familiar atmosphere. In the low-ceilinged noisy room he found several of the fellows to whom Rauch had introduced him at the Cocoanut Tree, and with them the sculptress girl, Rebecca Stram, in a dirty yellow sweater and a cloud of smoke. They all hailed him joyfully, the Stram girl besought him anew to sit for his bust, and the talk rambled on, much as it did in his father's office at Euphoria on idle winter afternoons, go as you please, leaning back with your feet up and developing what you had in your mind while the others smoked and swung their legs and listened: all as easy and intelligible as could be.

Yet that was not the impression that lasted. What Vance carried back to Paul's Landing was his bewildering adventure at the Tarrants', where everybody talked and nobody listened, or said anything particularly worth hearing, if you thought it over—but where the look of the rooms and the people had something harmonious and long-related, suggesting a mysterious intelligence between persons and things, an atmosphere as heavy with the Past as that of the library at the Willows.