living some other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he
must drop back into his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to
grope his way through the endless labyrinth of his material
difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed in on him like a
fog.

"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.

He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of
a man philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by
another.

Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known
Flamel since his youth could have given no good reason for the
vague mistrust that he inspired. Some people are judged by their
actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of
defining Flamel is to say that his well-known leniency of view was
vaguely divined to include himself. Simple minds may have
resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his
perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge
against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of
those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may
occasionally yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy
escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could
no more be worn in Flamel's presence than a surplice in the