Stacey arrived in New York one afternoon about a week later. His boat was to sail the next morning. He went to the small hotel on Tenth Street where he always stayed.

“How do you do, Mr. Carroll? Glad to see you, sir,” said the clerk.

Stacey wasted no time, but dropped his suitcase in his room and set off immediately up-town on the top of a motor-bus.

It was clear dry weather, not too cold, and the city’s buildings stood out sharply against a brilliant sky. Stacey had never liked this glittering hardness in the atmosphere of New York. The Metropolitan Tower wouldn’t be so bad and the Woolworth would be bully, he had often thought, if only they would soar up dimly into a softening haze, as they would in Paris. The whole show was good, but not good enough to stand this crude vivid light. Nothing could stand it—neither faÇades nor human faces. It was like an immense close-up at the movies. And to-day, since he continued to feel about him and within himself so much confusion, this effect of physical clarity really made him uneasy.

But the discomfort soon faded and he thought only that he was to have this whole afternoon and evening with Philip Blair. He took the stuffy elevator in the Harlem apartment house, stepped out, and hurried down the dark hall to Philip’s door with no other feeling than gladness.

Philip himself opened the door, and his face showed as warm a pleasure as his guest’s. He was thin and slight almost to emaciation, with keen prominent blue eyes, a sharp-cut nose whose nostrils seemed to sniff like a dog’s, and a short fair moustache. He looked like a medieval ascetic, superficially modernized. Just at present he was in shirt-sleeves and held a pair of compasses in one hand. With the other he shook Stacey’s eagerly.

“By Jove, I’m glad to see you!” he cried. “But why do you give me only a day? Why didn’t you come and stay a week? Come on in!” And he led Stacey down a narrow hall and through the dining-room into his study.

“Couldn’t do it,” Stacey replied on the way. “Whole business so sudden.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” the other assented quietly.

“What you working on?” asked Stacey, leaning over the drawing-board in the study and fumbling abstractedly at the same time with a pile of sketches that lay, curled up anyhow, on a table close-by.

“Public library for a village,” said Blair, pulling a sketch of the front elevation from the rattling heap of papers, spreading it out on the board, and holding it down flat.

Together they leaned over it. Stacey nodded. “Fine!” he said. “Awfully good! Let’s see. It’s not for a New England village. Where is it for? Pennsylvania?”

“Pretty near. Western New York, close to the Pennsylvania line.”

Stacey continued to examine the drawing, then began to smile, poked his finger at it with a wide curving gesture, and finally broke into a frank laugh. “Always the same old Phil!” he said gaily, dropping into an easy chair. “Quite incorrigible! Don’t you ever remember how many shameful ‘Hors Concours’ you were always getting at the Beaux Arts, and how disapprovingly old Fromelles used to shake his head over your projets, and what they all used to think of you: ‘Too bad! Just a little vulgar! Just a little vulgar!’”

Blair laughed with him, but after a moment Stacey became suddenly silent and gazed with a puzzled frown at his friend, wondering how it was that any one so physically frail as Blair could possess such creative masculine vigor of mind.

“How are you getting on, Phil?” he asked abruptly.

Blair shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, all right enough,” he answered lightly. “I scrape along without too much difficulty. It would be easier in one way if I were to go in with some firm, but—”

“Never do—for you, never in the world!” Stacey interrupted, shaking his head. “You’d feel crushed.”

“Yes, I’d rather go it on my own. I’m all right. Absolutely the only thing that bothers me is not getting enough jobs. I don’t mean because I need them financially, but because—you know how it is—to learn, a man has to see his work in actual stone and brick.”

“You’re too damned good!” said Stacey hotly. “You’ve got the real stuff in you. Here am I, prospering like a—like a pork packer, while you struggle along unappreciated; yet you’re a thousand times better than I.”

“You’re too generous and loyal, Stacey,” Blair returned, with a shake of his fair head. “I couldn’t ever reach your delicacy in detail.”

“Detail, yes,” Stacey muttered. “I—” He, too, shook his head, while his friend gazed at him with a calm clear smile. “Lack of vulgarity is the curse of more places than the Beaux Arts,” Stacey concluded suddenly. “There’s a brand-new thought for you—brand-new so far as I’m concerned. Make what you can of it, Phil.”

Philip Blair laughed. “Sounds interesting,” he said. “I’ll have to think it over. Anyhow, you needn’t worry about me. I manage to scrape enough together to live and keep Catherine and the boys going.”

“Where are the kiddies?”

“Out for a walk with her. They’ll be in soon.”

After this a silence, that perhaps both young men had felt lying in wait, descended upon them. Blair was the first to meet frankly what it stood for.

“So you’re going over into it, Stacey,” he said.

Stacey nodded. “I’ve got to.”

“Well,” said Blair slowly, after another pause, “I suppose, in view of the tremendous issue, I ought to feel principally gladness that one bit more of strength and courage is thrown into the right side of the balance. But, do you know, I don’t—I can’t. Perhaps it’s because I’m not big enough to get away from personal feelings. And yet I don’t think it’s merely that. The truth is, Stacey, that you and I are individualists. We were born like that and we’ve been brought up that way. The profession we’ve chosen is individualistic—not perfectly so, because we have to meet the ideas of our clients; but a good deal so, all the same. For the very fact that people in general are so standardized, unindividual, wanting in ideas of their own, makes them leave pretty much in our hands the houses they hire us to build for them.”

Stacey was smiling. He recognized with affectionate amusement a characteristic of his friend’s mind—that inability to leave any side issue of a theme unexplored before pursuing the main theme onward. How different from Stacey’s father! And also how honest and thorough! Most people thought that Philip had a wandering mind. He knew better.

For Philip always did come back to the theme. He was back in it now. “We’re against the current,” he was saying sadly. “The whole trend of the world is overwhelmingly toward collectivism, doing and feeling in common, standardization. And yet—and yet—the unit is the individual; it can’t ever be the group. The individual’s a fact. There you have him, complete, a world—his only one—to himself. The group’s a fiction, a composite photograph, lifeless. Oh, I know the whole trend of things is wrong and that we’re right—so long as we harness our individualism and don’t let it grow into a silly cult.

“Right?—wrong?” he went on musingly, staring off through the window. “What do I mean by right and wrong? Well, I mean, I suppose, creatively valuable, creatively harmful. And the war’s going to rush and swell the advance of collectivism. No more art, no more thought, no more real life! Not till long after the war is over. You’ll see.”

Well, it was what Stacey himself had told his father. But he hadn’t perceived all that it meant. That was what you got for being impressionistic instead of thorough, he told himself humbly.

Blair turned his eyes back slowly to his friend. “And that,” he concluded, his thin face drawn with an expression of pain, “is why—though I know you’ve got to do it, and though I’d do it too, if I had the bodily health—that is why I feel, above all, grief that you must throw yourself into that inferno of awful physical and worse mental suffering. Forgive me!” he cried remorsefully.

But the shadow that had come over Stacey’s face was not there because of the prophecy of pain. Stacey was thinking of the contrast between Philip’s words and Marian’s. “That’s all right, Phil,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t what you said that bothered me. It was something else. Of course I know what I’m going into—so far as one can know through his imagination about something totally outside his experience. It’s a great deal better to think of it beforehand and be ready.”

They dropped all talk of the war after this; and before long Philip’s sons dashed in. Jack, the younger boy, who was two-and-a-half, ran at once shyly to his father; but the older, who was five, gave his hand to Stacey with a pretty confiding cordiality.

“How do you do, Uncle Stacey?” he said, with childish formality, recently enough learned to demand care and effort.

“Hello, Carter,” returned Stacey, who liked the boy and liked being called uncle.

The child leaned against his knee. “Uncle Stacey,” he exclaimed, his soft eager face glowing, “will you do ‘Fly away, Jack! Fly away, Jill!’ for me? I think I can find them this time. I think I know where they went.”

Philip Blair laughed. “Having achieved formality,” he said, “he puts it behind him at once. ‘Something accomplished, something done, has earned a night’s repose.’”

“Quite right, too,” Stacey replied. “I promise I will after just a little while, Carter. Where’s your mother?”

“Here,” said Catherine, coming through the doorway. “It was windy out. I had to fix my hair.”

She shook hands with Stacey, a little shyly and formally, almost like her son.

“Let’s go into the sitting-room,” she said, in the abrupt way she had of speaking. “There’s a pleasant fire in there.”

But when they had sat down in front of it they all became silent—all, that is, save Jack, who, on the floor with his toys, babbled to himself ceaselessly of a thousand important things. Even Carter was silent. He sat on a foot-stool and gazed at Stacey from a little distance with patient expectancy.

Stacey, however, had forgotten him. A dozen thoughts were moving through the young man’s mind, yet not turbulently, but smoothly, without interference, like ships on a wide river. Perhaps this was because he was not thinking of himself at all, but of Phil and Catherine. He looked at Catherine, sitting there across the hearth, she, too, apparently far away in thought, and tried to study her objectively. She was tall and dark and handsome, with high cheek-bones, a high forehead, and black eyes set deep beneath long sweeping lashes. She had a magnificent figure, lithe, supple and without opulence—slender, even,—but making evident the large bony structure. So, too, with her head. It was like a firm Mantegna drawing, revealing clearly what lay beneath the smooth close-textured skin. Therefore in repose her face appeared even stern. There was something sculpturesque about Catherine.

But these things were externals. What was she really like? Stacey could not discover. In all the years that he had known her, first as Philip’s fiancÉe and then as Philip’s wife, he had never got beneath her intense shy reserve. Yet—which seemed odd—there was no sense of constraint between them as long as Phil was there, too. Stacey could talk impersonally with her, or, better still, sit for a long time silent with her, as now, perfectly at ease and sure that she, too, felt at ease. That was all, though. He could not understand the marriage. Still, he recognized that it was a happy marriage and he admitted loyally that a man very rarely did understand his most intimate friend’s choice of a wife.

Sometimes, he remembered, he had tried to sum up Catherine and her relation to Phil impressionistically. Once he had told himself that she was like a castle and Philip like a wind blowing around it, rattling the shutters but leaving the castle permanent and unchanged. But he felt a touch of impatience now in the recollection of that judgment. He had always been full of such fancies. Perhaps he had even cultivated them and felt a small pride in them. Somehow, in these last weeks he had come to feel almost antipathy for these baubles. What did they really explain? What good did it do to catch a mood, even truly? What was a mood but an evanescent unrelated thing?

But distaste for oneself does not suffice to alter one’s nature. Stacey did not perceive that his present musings had the same quality they disapproved of.

It was Carter who broke the silence—with a plaintive unconscious sigh.

Philip laughed, but his visitor started. “Oh, Carter, old chap,” he said remorsefully, “I forgot all about Jack and Jill! I’m ready now. Come on over.”

The child ran to him delightedly, all the ages and ages of tedious waiting forgotten at once; and Stacey took a postage stamp from his pocket, tore it carefully in half, and gummed the pieces to the nails of his two forefingers. Experience had taught him that stamps were safer than scraps of ordinary paper, which had an embarrassing way of coming off.

“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,

One named Jack and one named Jill.

Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!

. . . . . .

Come back, Jack!—Come back, Jill!”