phill labor he had
become at thirty-seven one of the big gynecologists. He was taking his
success with the quiet relish of a man who had had to work for it hard. And
yet he had not been spoiled by success. He worked even harder than
before--so hard, in fact, that Deborah, with whom through Bruce and Edith
he had long ago struck up an easy bantering friendship, had sturdily set
herself the task of prying open his eyes a bit. She had taken him to her
school at night and to queer little foreign cafes. And Baird, with a humor
of his own, had retaliated by dragging her to the Astor Roof and to musical
plays.

"If my eyes are to be opened," he had doggedly declared, "I propose to have
some diamonds in the scenery, and a little cheery ragtime, too. You've got
a good heart, Deborah Gale, but your head is full of tenements."

To-night to divert Bruce's thoughts from his wife, Baird started him
talking of his work. In six weeks Bruce had crammed his mind with the
details of skyscraper building, and his talk was bewildering now, bristling
with technical terms, permeated through and through with the feeling of
strain and fierce competition. As Roger listened he had again that sharp
and oppressive sensation of a savage modern town unrelentingly pressing,
pressing in. Restlessly he glanced at Baird who sat listening quietly. And
Roger thought of the likeness between their two professions. For Bruce,
too, was a surgeon. His patients were the husbands in their distracting
offices. Baird's were the wives and mothers in their equally distracting
homes. Which were more tense, the husbands or wives? And, good Lord, what
was it all about, this feverish strain of getting and spending? What were
they spending? Their very life's blood. And what were they getting?
Happiness? What did most of them know of real happiness? How little they
knew, how blind they were, and yet how they laughed and chattered along,
how engrossed in their little games. What children, oh, what children!

"And am I any better than the rest? Do I know what I'm after--what I'm
about?"

He left them soon, for he felt very tired. He went to his daughter to say
good-night. And in her room the talk he had heard became to him suddenly
remote, that restless world of small account. For in Edith, in the one
brief hour since her father had seen her last, there had come a great
transformation, into her face an eager light. She was slipping down into a
weird small world which for a