It was a muddle of impressions: the picture of the poor soul with his
clamor for a job; the satisfied, brutal egotism of Brome Porter, who lived
as if life were a huge poker game; the overfed, red-cheeked Caspar, whom he
remembered to have seen only once before, when the young polo captain was
stupid drunk; the silly young cub of a Hitchcock. Even the girl was one of
them. If it weren't for the women, the men would not be so keen on the
scent for gain. The women taught the men how to spend, created the needs
for their wealth. And the social game they were instituting in Chicago was
so emptily imitative, an echo of an echo!

There was Carson: he was your image of modern power--the lean, hungry,
seamed face, surmounted by a dirty-gray pall. He was clawing his way to the
top of the heap.

Sommers stopped to laugh at himself. His fury was foolish, a mere
generalization of discontent from very little data. Still, it was a relief
to be out in the purring night sounds. He had passed from the affluent
stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street.
His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and
squalor. The public part of it--the street and the sidewalks--was equally
dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping
down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his
preoccupation he stumbled occasionally into some stagnant pool.

Should he take Lindsay's job, if he had the chance? Obstinately his mind
reverted to a newspaper paragraph that had caught his eye months before: on
the occasion of some disturbance over women students in the Western Medical
College, Dr. Lindsay had told the men that "physicians should be especially
considerate of women, if for no other reason, _because their success in
their profession would depend very largely on women_." Certainly, if he