key with the man in charge of the elevator, her voice sounded remarkably
fresh and pleasant. They left the house together, but while she walked
rapidly toward Broadway he contented himself with strolling leisurely
along Fourth Avenue, where he bent a vacant gaze on the objects
assembled in the windows of dealers in "antiques."

But his thoughts did not so much as brush the treasures at which he
stared, and neither the hurrying crowd--which had a restless, workaday
look at the morning hour--nor the noisily clanging cars broke into the
exquisitely reared castle of his dreams. Since the evening before his
imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music,
flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the
wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted
if unreal measures. Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary
ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness,
of his coming years--so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere
physical fact of birth. He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in
his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for
the first and only time. In the confused tangle of his fancy he saw
Laura like some great white flower, growing out of reach, yet not
entirely beyond endeavour, and the ladder that went up to her was made
by his own immediate successes. Then the footlights before his play swam
in his picture and he heard already the applause of crowded houses and
felt in his head the intoxication of his triumph. Act by act, scene by
scene, he rehearsed in fancy his great drama, seeing the players throng
before the footlights and seeing, too, Laura applauding softly from a
stage box at the side. He had had moments of despondency over his idea,
had grovelled in abject despair during trying periods of execution, but
now all uncertainty--all misgivings evaporated like an obscuring fog
before a burst of light. The light, indeed, had at the moment the full