Vance stared at the big wavering script, so like his grandmother's ungirt frame. For the "Seekers" he cared not a fig; but the springs of boyhood welled up in him at the prospect of seeing Mrs. Scrimser. She was the only human being he had really loved in the days when his universe was enclosed in the few miles between Euphoria and Crampton; the others, parents, sisters even, were just the more or less comfortable furniture of life; but his grandmother's soul and his had touched… . He thought himself back onto the porch at Crampton, smelt the neglected lilacs, heard the jangle of the Euphoria trolley, and his grandmother saying: "Don't a day like this make you feel as if you could get to God right through that blue up there?" He remembered having answered, rather petulantly, that he didn't feel as if anything would take him near God; but now he was at least nearer to understanding what she had meant. Perhaps what she called "God" was the same as what he called "The Mothers"—that mysterious Sea of Being of which the dark reaches swayed and rumoured in his soul … perhaps one symbol was as good as another to figure the imperceptible point where the fleeting human consciousness touches Infinity… .

Curious, that this should happen just as he was facing the idea of going back to Euphoria. His grandmother's letter, the prospect of seeing her in a few days, made the return home appear easier and more natural. As soon as she and Laura Lou had met he would decide… . He was sure those two would take a liking to each other.

Mrs. Scrimser bade him call her up at six on the day when she was to arrive, and he hoped to persuade her to come down that very morning to see Laura Lou, who was still too feverish to leave her bed. Laura Lou was excited and happy at the prospect of the visit; he saw from her eagerness how much she had felt the enforced solitude of her life in New York. "I guess maybe she'll go round with me a little when I'm better," she said with her drawn smile.

"Why, I'd go round with you myself if you wanted me to," Vance rejoined, with conscious hypocrisy; but she said evasively: "Why, how can you, with all your work?"