At five in the morning, through dying lights and dead streets, he made his way back to Mrs. Hubbard's. All the glory had vanished; his brain was sick with the forced inrush of reality. A last glimpse of the impossible swept through him. Halo had said: "Because I will never leave my husband for my lover … " and that meant—what else could it mean?—that she would have come to him if there had been no obstacle between them. For one moment it seemed almost enough to feel that there, out of his sight but in his soul, the great reaches of her love lay tossing and silvering… . But as he drew near his own door the ugliness of the present blotted out the vision. At the corner of Sixth Avenue a half-tipsy girl solicited him. At Mrs. Hubbard's door, a gaunt cat shot out of the area. That was his world, his street, his house… . He knew now that he and she would never be free, either of them. She would never come to him; it was all a fading blur of unreality… . He put his key into the lock, and went upstairs with the feet of an old man.

The next day Laura Lou was in bed with one of her feverish colds. She had caught a chill the day of the "Storecraft" show, in her thin summer coat. These colds were frequent with her now, and each seemed to leave her a little weaker. Vance did not dare to send for the doctor again; he had been several times lately, and there had been no money to pay him. Vance did what he could to make her comfortable, and explained to Mrs. Hubbard—whose manner, as the weeks passed, though still oppressively ladylike, had grown more distant—the food must be carried up, milk heated, the cough mixture measured out. Then, having put a quarter into the hand of the dishevelled Swedish servant girl, who seldom understood his instructions and never carried them out, he took his way to the office.

There had been no word from Lambart & Co., the publishers who had been so confident about detaching him from Dreck and Saltzer; probably the subject of his novel had made them lukewarm. In his letter box he found a letter from his grandmother; there was no time to read it then, but the sight of her writing brought up a vision of Euphoria, of the comfortable Maplewood Avenue house, the safety and decency of home. What if he were to accept his father's suggestion and take Laura Lou out there to live? If he took on a newspaper job, and wrote no novels or literary articles, he supposed his contracts with Dreck and Saltzer and the New Hour would lapse of themselves. He would simply go back to being the old Vance Weston again, and it would be as if the New York one had never existed… .