once went as far
in that direction as the white house which Lucy had so admired long
ago--her "Beautiful House." George looked at it briefly and turned back,
rumbling with an interior laugh of some grimness. The house was white no
longer; nothing could be white which the town had reached, and the town
reached far beyond the beautiful white house now. The owners had given
up and painted it a despairing chocolate, suitable to the freight-yard
life it was called upon to endure.

George did not again risk going even so far as that, in the direction
of the millionaires, although their settlement began at least two miles
farther out. His thought of Lucy and her father was more a sensation
than a thought, and may be compared to that of a convicted cashier beset
by recollections of the bank he had pillaged--there are some thoughts to
which one closes the mind. George had seen Eugene only once since their
calamitous encounter. They had passed on opposite sides of the street,
downtown; each had been aware of the other, and each had been aware that
the other was aware of him, and yet each kept his eyes straight forward,
and neither had shown a perceptible alteration of countenance. It seemed
to George that he felt emanating from the outwardly imperturbable person
of his mother's old friend a hate that was like a hot wind.

At his mother's funeral and at the Major's he had been conscious that
Eugene was there: though he had afterward no recollection of seeing him,
and, while certain of his presence, was uncertain how he knew of it.
Fanny had not told him, for she understood George well enough not to
speak to him of Eugene or Lucy. Nowadays Fanny almost never saw either
of them and seldom thought of them--so sly is the way of time with life.
She was passing middle age, when old intensities and longings grow thin
and flatten out, as Fanny herself was thinning and flattening out; and
she was settling down contentedly to her apartment house intimacies.
She was precisely suited by the table-d'hote life, with its bridge,
its variable alliances and shifting feuds, and the long whisperings
of elderly ladies at corridor corners--those eager but suppressed
conversations, all sibilance, of which the elevator boy declared he
heard the words "she said" a million times and the word "she," five
million. The apartment house suited Fanny and swallowed her.

The city was so big, now, that people disappeared into it unnoticed, and
the disappearanc