e. The inland cities were in
the grip of strikes ... there were plenty of jobs, but few with the
temerity to attempt to fill them. And, besides, what had Fred Starratt
to offer in the way either of skill or brawn?... He grew to know the
meaning of impotence. No, he was a creature of the paved streets, and
to the paved streets he returned as swiftly as his feet and his
indifferent fortune could carry him. Besides, he had grown hungry for
familiar sights and faces, and perhaps, down deep, curiosity had been
the mainspring of his return. Even bitter ties have a pull that cannot
always be denied. At Fairview the presence of Monet had held him
almost a willing captive. There was something about the flame burning
in that almost frail body that had lighted even the ugliness of
Fairview with a strange beauty. He could not think of him as dead.
That last moment had been too tinged with the haunting poetry of life.
How often he had reconstructed that scene--the gray, sullen rain
pattering on the spent leaves, the quick-rushing sound of a body in
flight, the sudden leap of a soul toward greater freedom! And then the
vision of the churning pool below closing in triumphantly as it might
have done upon some reclaimed pagan creature that had tasted the
bitter wine of exile and returned in leaping joy to its chosen
element! It was not the shock and sadness of death that had sent Fred
Starratt for a moment stark mad into the storm and freedom, but rather
an ecstasy of loneliness ... a yearning to match daring with daring.

And now he was home again, in his own gray-green city, lying beneath
tattered quilts in a hovel, with the selfsame February sun that had
once pricked him to a spiritual adventure flooding in upon him! He
rose and threw open the door. The soft noontide air floated in,
displacing the fetid atmosphere. He looked about the room searchingly.
In the daylight it seemed even more unkempt, but less forbidding. A
two-burner kerosene stove stood upon an empty box just under the
window. On another upturned box at its side lay a few odds and ends of
cooking utensils, shriveling bits of food, a plate or two. He found a
loaf of dry bread and cut a slice from it. This, together with a glass
of water, completed his breakfast.

He tried to brush his weather-beaten clothes into decency with a stump
of a whisk broom and to wipe the dust of the highroad from his almost
spent shoes. But, somehow, these feeble attempts at gentility seemed