Rebecca Stram, clothed to the chin in dirty linen, stepped back with screwed-up eyes, gave a dab at the clay, and sighed: "If you'd only fall in love with me I'd make a big thing out of this… ."

Vance heard her, but drew a mask of vacancy over his face. Love—falling in love! Were there any words in the language as hateful to him, or as void of meaning? His love, he thought, was like his art—something with a significance so different from the current one that when the word was spoken before him a door flew shut in his soul, closing him in with his own groping ardours. Love! Did he love Laura Lou—had he ever loved her? What other name could he give to the upwelling emotion which had flung him back in her arms when she had driven up to the door that day in Dixon's carryall? It was over a year since then; and he did not yet understand why the passion which had shaken him that day to the roots of his being had not transformed and renewed both their lives. The mere thought that she was leaving him—and leaving him because he had unwittingly wounded, neglected her—had opened an abyss at his feet. That was what life would be to him without her: a dark pit into which he felt himself crashing headlong, like falling in an aeroplane at night… . It hadn't taken five minutes to break up Mrs. Tracy's plan, win back Laura Lou, and laugh away all the bogies bred of solitude and jealousy—poor child, she'd actually been jealous of him! And he had been young enough (a year ago) to imagine that one can refashion life in five minutes—remould it, as that man Fitzgerald said, nearer to the heart's desire! … God—the vain longing of the soul of man for something different, when everything in human relations is so eternally alike, unchanging and unchangeable!

They had broken up at Paul's Landing. Mrs. Tracy, embittered and resentful, had sold the house and gone to California with Upton. But Laura Lou had remained, reconciled, enraptured, and Vance had brought her to New York to live… . Could anything be more different, to all appearances? And yet, in a week, he had known that everything was going to be exactly the same—and that the centre and source of all the sameness were Laura Lou and her own little unchangeable self… .

"What you feel about Blemer's book" (one of the fellows was haranguing between pipe-puffings) "is that it's so gorgeously discontinuous, like life—" (life discontinuous? Oh, God! Vance thought.) "Not a succession of scenes fitting into each other with the damned dead logic of a picture puzzle, but a drunken orgy of unrelatedness… ."