“Ah——­” came softly from Cairns.

“I’d like to know some folks,” Bedient admitted.

Cairns was smiling at him.  “You’ll have to have a card at my clubs.  There’s Teuton’s, Swan’s and the Smilax down Gramercy way....  Perhaps we’d better stop in at the Swan’s for a bite to eat.  The idea is, you can try them all, Andrew, and put up at the one you fit into best——­”

“Exactly,” breathed Bedient.

“You won’t like the Smilax overmuch,” Cairns ventured, “but you may pass a forenoon there, while I’m at work.  Stately old place, with many paintings and virgin silence.  The women artists are going there more and more——­”

“I like paintings,” said Bedient.

They walked across Times Square and toward the Avenue, through Forty-second.  Cairns waited for the quiet to ask: 

“Andrew, you haven’t found Her yet—­The Woman?”

“No.  Have you?”

“Did—­I used to have one, too?”

“Yes.”

“Andrew, do you think She’s in New York?” Cairns asked.

“It’s rather queer about that,” Bedient answered.  “I was watching a rain-storm from the porch of the hacienda seven or eight days ago, when it came to me that I’d better take the first ship up.  I sailed the next morning.”

This startled Cairns.  He was unaccustomed to such sincerity.  “You mean it occurred to you that She was here—­the One you used to tell me about in Asia?”

“Yes.”

Cairns now felt an untimely eagerness of welcome for the wanderer.  A renewal of Bedient’s former attractions culminated in his mind, and something more that was fine and fresh and permanent.  He twinged for what had happened at the apartment....  Bedient was a man’s man, strong as a platoon in a pinch—­that had been proved.  He was plain as a sailor in ordinary talk, but Cairns knew now that he had only begun to challenge Bedient’s finer possessions of mind....  Here in New York, a man over thirty years old, who could speak of the Woman-who-must-be-somewhere.  And Bedient spoke in the same ideal, unhurt way of twenty, when they had spread blankets together under strange stars...  Cairns knew in a flash that something was gone from his own breast that he had carried then.  It was an altogether uncommon moment to him.  “So it has not all been growth,” he thought.  “All that has come since has not been fineness."...  He felt a bit denied, as if New York had “gotten” to him, as if he had lost a young prince’s vision, that the queen mother had given him on setting out....  He was just one of the million males, feathering nests of impermanence, and stifling the true hunger for the skies and the great cleansing migratory flights....

All this was a miracle to David Cairns.  He was solid; almost English in his up-bringing to believe that man’s work, and established affairs, thoughts and systems generally were right and unimpeachable.  He heard himself scoffing at such a thing, had it happened to another....  He stared into Bedient’s face, brown, bright and calm.  He had seen only good humor and superb health before, but for an instant now, he perceived a spirit that rode with buoyancy, after a life of loneliness and terror that would have sunk most men’s anchorage, fathoms deeper than the reach of the longest cable of faith.