“Browning,” she said excitedly.

“Yes....  Good-by and thank you....  To-morrow?”

“Yes.”

* * * * *

He left her in the whirl of this new conception.  She was taking dinner with David Cairns that night.  David, she felt, had arranged this for further urging in the matter of her seeing his friend.  And now she smiled at the surprise in store for him; then for a long time, until the yellows and browns were thickly shadowed about her, Beth sat very still, thinking about the Vina Nettleton of yesterday, and the altered and humble David Cairns of the past fortnight....  In the single saying of Bedient’s, that he had found Cairns finer than he knew, there was a remarkable, winsome quality for her perception.  Bedient had started the revolution which was clearing the inner atmospheres of his friend; and yet, he refused any part.

David took her for dinner to a club far down-town—­a dining-room on the twentieth floor, overlooking the rivers and the bay, the shipping and the far shores pointed off with lights....  They waited by a window in the main hall for a moment while a smaller room was being arranged.  Forty or more business men were banqueting in a glare of light and glass and red roses—­a commercial dinner with speeches.  The talk had to do with earnings, per cents, leakages, markets and such matters.  The lower lid of many an eye was updrawn in calculation.

Beth shivered, for she saw avarice, cunning, bluff, campaigning with humor and natural forces.  “The starry night and the majestic rivers might just as well be plaster-walls,” she whispered.  “What terrible occupations are these to make our brothers so dull, bald and stodgy-looking?”

“It’s their art,” said Cairns.  “They start in merrily enough, but it’s a fight out in the centre of the current.  You see them all of one genial dining-countenance, yet this day they fought each other in the streets below, and to-morrow again....  It’s not only the sweep of the current, but each other, they have to fight....  Oh, it’s very easy for an artist to look and feel superior, Beth, but we know very well how much is sordid routine in our own decenter games—­and suppose we had been called to money-making instead.  It would catch us young, and we’d either harden or fail.”

...  They were taken to a place of stillness and the night-view was restoring....  Though Cairns had just left Bedient, he had not been told about the portrait nor the first sitting.  Beth wondered if Bedient foresaw that she would appreciate this.  She was getting so that she could believe anything of the Wanderer.  For a long time they talked about him....  Cairns already was emerging from the miseries of reaction; new ways of work had opened; he was fired with fresh growth and delights of service.  Beth was charmed with him....  At last she said: 

“Nor has Mr. Bedient missed those rare and subtle things which make Vina Nettleton the most important woman of my acquaintance.”