that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation
and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the
hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived,
to be civil to Barton Flamel.



VI


THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday
emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of
the yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a
mist of cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women.
The part was a small one--Flamel had few intimate friends--but
composed of more heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into
which society usually runs. The reaction from the chief episode
of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for
any kind of personal saliency. Cleverness was useful in business;
but in society it seemed to him as futile as the sham cascades
formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill. He
liked the collective point of view that goes with the civilized
uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife's attitude implied the
same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more and more
into Flamel's intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she
enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative
form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing
preference for the kind of people who have their thinking done for
them by the community.