boards or the velvet
elegance of studios where authority and preciousness, and occasionally
attainment, reside, and sometimes do not.

_Cognatis maculis similis fera_.

Neville was busy, but not too busy to go about in the evening among his
own kind, and among other kinds, too. This unexpected resurgance within
him of the social instinct, he made no attempt to account for to others
or to himself. He had developed a mental and physical restlessness,
which was not yet entirely nervous, but it had become sufficiently
itching to stir him out of fatigue when the long day's work had
ended--enough to drive him out of the studio--at first merely to roam
about at hazard through the livelier sections of the city. But to the
lonely, there is no lonelier place than a lively one; and the false
brilliancy and gaiety drove him back upon himself and into his lair
again, where for a while he remained meditating amid the sombre menace
of looming canvases and the heavy futility of dull-gold hangings, and
the mischievous malice of starlight splintering into a million
incandescent rainbow rays through the sheet of glass above.

Out of this, after some days, he emerged, set in motion by his
increasing restlessness. And it shoved him in the direction of his kind
once more--and in the direction of other kinds.

He dined at his sister's in Seventy-ninth Street near Madison Avenue; he
dined with the Grandcourts on Fifth Avenue; he decorated a few dances,
embellished an opera box now and then, went to Lakewood and Tuxedo for
week ends, rode for a few days at Hot Springs, frequented his clubs,
frequented Stephanie, frequented Maxim's.

And all the while it seemed to him as though he were temporarily
enduring something which required patience, which could not last
forever, which must one day end in a great change, a complete
transformation for himself, of himself, of the world around him and of
his aim and hope and purpose in living. At moments, too, an odd
sensation of expectancy came over him--the sense of waiting, of
suppressed excitement. And he could not account for it.

Perhaps it concerned the finishing of his great mural frieze for the
Court House--that is, the completion of the section begun in September.
For, when it was done, and cleared out of his studio, and had been set
in its place, framed by the rose and gold of marble and ormolu, a heavy
reaction of relief set in, leaving him listless and indifferent at
first, then idle