he lost interest in his work, came late and left early, or disappeared for two or three days at a time without troubling himself to account for his absences.  At last even those who had been cynical enough to smile over his disgrace at the temperance supper began to speak of him as a hopeless failure, and he lost the support of the feminine community when one Sunday morning, just as the Baptist and Methodist churches were releasing their congregations, he walked up Eubaw Avenue with a young woman less known to those sacred edifices than to the saloons of North Fifth Street.

Undine’s estimate of people had always been based on their apparent power of getting what they wanted—­provided it came under the category of things she understood wanting.  Success was beauty and romance to her; yet it was at the moment when Elmer Moffatt’s failure was most complete and flagrant that she suddenly felt the extent of his power.  After the Eubaw Avenue scandal he had been asked not to return to the surveyor’s office to which Ben Frusk had managed to get him admitted; and on the day of his dismissal he met Undine in Main Street, at the shopping hour, and, sauntering up cheerfully, invited her to take a walk with him.  She was about to refuse when she saw Millard Binch’s mother looking at her disapprovingly from the opposite street-corner.

“Oh, well, I will—­” she said; and they walked the length of Main Street and out to the immature park in which it ended.  She was in a mood of aimless discontent and unrest, tired of her engagement to Millard Binch, disappointed with Moffatt, half-ashamed of being seen with him, and yet not sorry to have it known that she was independent enough to choose her companions without regard to the Apex verdict.

“Well, I suppose you know I’m down and out,” he began; and she responded virtuously:  “You must have wanted to be, or you wouldn’t have behaved the way you did last Sunday.”

“Oh, shucks!” he sneered.  “What do I care, in a one-horse place like this?  If it hadn’t been for you I’d have got a move on long ago.”

She did not remember afterward what else he said:  she recalled only the expression of a great sweeping scorn of Apex, into which her own disdain of it was absorbed like a drop in the sea, and the affirmation of a soaring self-confidence that seemed to lift her on wings.  All her own attempts to get what she wanted had come to nothing; but she had always attributed her lack of success to the fact that she had had no one to second her.  It was strange that Elmer Moffatt, a shiftless out-cast from even the small world she despised, should give her, in the very moment of his downfall, the sense of being able to succeed where she had failed.  It was a feeling she never had in his absence, but that his nearness always instantly revived; and he seemed nearer to her now than he had ever been.  They wandered on to the edge of the vague park, and sat down on a bench behind the empty band-stand.