“I think I’m getting to be—­just a biped....  I’m glad you came up....  Here we are at Swan’s,” said Cairns.

* * * * *

Like most writers, David Cairns was intensely interesting to himself.  His sudden reversal from bleak self-complacence to a clear-eyed view of his questionable approaches to real worth, was strong with bitterness, but deeply absorbing.  He was remarkable in his capacity to follow this opening of his own insignificance.  It had been slow coming, but ruthlessly now, he traced his way back from one breach to another, and finally to that night in the plaza at Alphonso, when he had been enabled to see service from a unique and winning angle, through the pack-train cook.  That was the key to his catching on; that, and his boy ideals of war had lifted his copy from the commonplace.  He remembered Bedient in China, in Japan, and in his own house—­how grudgingly he had appeared in his working hours.  He felt like an office-boy who has made some pert answer to an employer too big and kind to notice.  Now and then up the years, certain warm thoughts had come to him from those island nights, but he had forgotten their importance in gaining his so-called standing.

Andrew Bedient was nothing like the man he had expected to find.  He remembered now that he might have looked for these rare elements of character, since the boyhood talks had promised them, and power had emanated from them....  Still, Bedient had grown marvellously, in strange, deep ways.  Cairns could not fathom them all, but he realized that nothing better could happen to him than to study this man.  Indeed, his mind was fascinated in following the rich leads of his friend’s resources.  He consoled himself for his shortcomings with the thought that, at least, he was ready to see....

They talked as of old, far into the night.  Cairns found himself endeavoring with a swift, nervous eagerness to show his best to Andrew Bedient, and to be judged by that best.  He spoke of none of the achievements which the world granted to be his; instead, the little byway humanities were called forth, for the other to hear—­buds of thought and action, which other pressures had kept from fertilizing into seed—­the very things he would have delighted in relating to a dear, wise woman.  Something about Bedient called them forth, and Cairns fell into new depths.  “I thought it was pure sex-challenge which made a man bring these things to a woman.” (This is the way he developed the idea afterward.) “But that can’t be all, since I unfolded so to Bedient....  He has me going in all directions like a steam-shovel.”