touch of the familiar swagger. "Had to be done. Can't allow surroundings to influence your imagination. That's all there is to anything-imagination. What is all this stuff the poet sings? Young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love; that's the bunk. You feel the way you think, and you think the way you want to. I could have written the 'Vision of Sir Launfal' at the North Pole, and if I see a robin or a green leaf I don't suddenly have to start skipping rope. Let me read you this junk; it isn't long." "I wish you would," I said. "I may be a slave to surroundings, but just now all I can think about is shipwrecks and snow-drifts and quinine."

Cary lit a cigarette, as he always did before reading aloud, though he never touched it after the first word. He read well, with a sense of the theatre in his dialogue, and he had a pleasing voice of which he was fully aware.

At the door of his apartment Manning paused, out of breath from the steep stairs, and fumbled for his key. He realized that he had walked unusually fast, and that he was still nervously anxious to have the door open and lock behind him. He had almost run the ten blocks from Nina's house to get here safely. And yet there had been no danger. Everything was over between them, and had he even weakened as he feared, he could not have turned back. She would have refused to see him.

In the dark he found the switch and turned on the lights. He took off his coat, heavy with the rain, and hung it where it would dry without wrinkling. The whole room seemed to Manning more friendly, as though it said: "You had to fight this out by yourself, my boy, but now that you've won, I'm glad you've come back."

The room had been the scene of such futile, harrowing struggles with himself. Each design on the carpet, every object on the mantel, was magnetized with the agony of some great indecision. To phone or not to phone. To write or not

to write. What had she meant when she said good-night that way? Why hadn't she worn his flowers?

All that was over, thank God! Henceforward the room was his alone, for work and leisure undisturbed, as he had planned. No petty problems of a woman's vanity, but the serious things he had meant to do when he first took the apartment; the play which he had abandoned because she had not praised the scenario; the book which he had so long neglected in favor of endless letters about love. What place had love in the thoughts of a serious man? in the affairs of a cold, gray, busy world? Certainly not first place; and yet he had allowed it to rule him to the exclusion of all else.

Manning smiled at the memory of his recent bondage. On the table in a silver frame stood her photograph; the only one she had ever given him. He started to put it away, and then replaced it. No, that would be a confession of weakness he did not feel. The picture was decorative; let it stay. It had no more power to move his thoughts than did she herself.

He opened a book and sat down, but the book lay on his knees, while his mind reviewed the details of the evening. He was pleased with himself. Not an easy thing for a man to do gracefully; to end a relationship when he saw fit, without acting like a cad. And he had done it well. He had waited confidently for some trivial disagreement to arise, and when she had lost her temper for a moment, he had taken her at her word and said goodby. Only this time there would be no appeal. Doubtless at this very moment she was wondering how to undo, without loss of dignity, the harm she had done. Before long there would probably be various timid advances, ingeniously casual meetings, apologies perhaps; but he would know how to deal with them. He was well out of the woods now, not to be caught again.

The book started to slip from his knees, and he realized that he was getting sleepy. He got up, went to the window and opened it. A cold rain was still falling sullenly, and he tucked back the curtains to keep them dry. A policeman stood sheltered in a doorway across the street.

dreamers, thought Manning, and went to bed at peace with the world.

Flow-ee! Flow-ee!

Manning sat up and rubbed his eyes at the sunlight that splashed the walls and ceiling. The curtains had slipped from their fastenings, and were being blown

He went to the window and looked down at a wagon filled with potted geraniums. A man led the horse by the bridle. A girl without hat or coat ran from a house across the street and bought two plants, and Manning wished that he were dressed and could buy one too, although he didn't like geraniums. But

there was something about this day that made a man feel-oh, yes, he remembered. He was beginning a new régime; independent. Well, it started auspiciously. God, what a day! It was inspiration for any attempt in the world. Standing by the open window, he touched his toes fifteen times instead of ten, and added four extra dips to the floor to his daily dozen.

Milk and papers at the door, water boiling for the tea, Manning whistled and sang in the shower. Breakfast over, he plunged at his work as though his mere physical energy could dash off a book in an hour. He realized, with remorse, how long it had been since he had given it any serious attention. Perhaps he had better read over what he had done recently, and get himself in the swing of it. He started sorting the scattered pages, striving to recall the mood in which he had written them, to recapture the enthusiasm which had driven him on. How flat and empty the words sounded! They seemed the work of another man; insincere, artificial, awkward. He was familiar with the consequences of letting a piece of work grow cold, and forced himself back on the track of his previous impulse, but he found himself welcoming interruptions. A servant came to clean the room, and Manning left his desk to talk with her while she worked. And she told him that spring had come, and that it made it very hard for her, because people left their windows open all day, and everything got covered with dust.

When she had gone he tried again, but a hand-organ began playing in the street, and he made this an excuse to smoke a cigarette and read the paper until it stopped. Twice he found himself looking at his watch, and wondered why, until he remembered that eleven o'clock had always been his hour for telephoning Nina. No more of that nonsense, anyway.

The breeze through the curtains brought the smell of grass and warm asphalt, and Manning remembered another day, a year ago, when they had decided to take the first train leaving the Grand Central and get off at the first station with a name they both liked. They picked out Undine, and then found it consisted entirely of tenements for the workers in a cotton

mill, and Nina insisted if this was Undine she would be Bertalda, and steal his affections, and they rode back to New York in a Ford and had dinner at Sherry's.

Once she had been reading "The Broad Highway"-they started on a walking tour. By setting out very early they managed to escape being run over, and they swung their stout cudgels, and whistled to the birds in the hawthorn hedges, and Manning greeted each Klaxon horn as the approach of the London Mail. In the fields near Pelham Bay, Nina found a four-leaf clover, and they swore that as long as she kept it, no evil could befall them or their love. They prepared to eat their bread and cheese in the shade of the hedge, but a mounted policeman told them picnicking wasn't allowed except on Sundays, so they threw away their stout cudgels and spent the rest of the day in the Bronx menagerie.

Then the telephone rang and Manning leaped at it, but stopped and let it ring until he had mastered the proper tone with which to answer her. But the only conversational opening was "Excuse it, please."

By noon he had managed to write nearly two pages of manuscript before he remembered that one of the characters he was writing about had been a war casualty in the third chapter. He tossed the papers in a drawer and went out to lunch. It was the first day of the year he had been without an overcoat, and the feeling made him throw back his shoulders and take deep breaths of the soft air. Somewhere he smelt peanuts roasting, and that made him think of baseball games, so he had lunch in a restaurant on 59th Street, and took the Ninth Avenue "L” to the Polo Grounds.

The Giants were playing the Reds, and came from behind to win in the last inning on a two-base hit by Frank Frisch. This put Manning in a good humor, and rather than have it rubbed away by the crowds, he walked over and took a bus down

town.

The Atlantic fleet was anchored in the North River, and the walks along Riverside Drive were crowded with sightseers. Couples leaned with elbows on the stone parapet, or walked hand in hand under trees; and among the benches be

lated nurse-maids were gathering toys and children in a homeward stampede.

Manning felt suddenly very sorry for himself, he couldn't say why, and moved two seats ahead to escape the cigar of the man in front of him. As the bus lumbered up the incline into 110th Street, he began making plans for the evening. The idea of dinner at his club was unusually depressing, and the odds on meeting any

one there whom he wished to see were always small. He could go home and start telephoning, but to whom? His friends would all be busy; and suppose he did catch some one. Dinner, theatre, a few drinks afterward. money wasted. What did people do in the evening when they had nothing else to do?

Time, sleep,

His new programme called for a pipe

excitement. He had had a difficult part to play and he had played it well, and all the worries and tangles that had troubled his mind for so long were gone, and he was free. Free to do what? To ride on the top of a bus alone? And then this part that he had played so well. Was it really

angry with him hundreds of times before, and he with her, and they had both regarded those times merely as shadows that marked the light of their happiness. And now he had betrayed their little convention; refused to let her take back a move. Oh, well, it was done now, and he