After the first day the sights which had sent shudders through him gradually began to assume the inevitability of custom.  Even the vision of the Weeping Willow, sorrowing at death withheld, failed to shake him.  The third night he slept undisturbed in the lap of frenzy and madness.  There was something at once pathetic and sublime in his adaptability to the broken suits of fortune.  He was learning what every man learns sooner or later—­to play the hand that is dealt, even in the face of a losing game.

Deep within him he found two opposing currents struggling for mastery—­one an overwhelming tide of disillusionment, the other a faith in things hitherto withheld.  Against the uncloaked figures of Helen Starratt and Hilmer loomed Ginger and Monet.  Did life always yield compensations, if one had the wit to discern them?  In the still watches of the night, when some fleeting sound had waked him, he used to think of Ginger as he had thought when a child of some intangible and remote vision that he could sense, but not define.  Would he ever see her again?  Suddenly, one night, he realized that he did not even know her name...  And Monet, who slept so quietly upon the cot next to him—­what would he have done without his companionship?  He used to raise himself on his elbow at times and look in the ghostly light of morning at Monet’s face, white and immobile, the thin and shapely lips parted ever so slightly, and marvel at the bland and childlike faith that was the basis of this almost breathless and inaudible sleep.  Fred had made friendships in his life, warm, hand-clasping, shoulder-thumping friendships, but they had been of gradual unfolding.  Never before had anyone walked full-grown into his affections.

On the third afternoon, sitting in the thick shade of a gracious tree, Monet had told Fred something of his story.  He was of mixed breed—­French and Italian, with a bit of Irish that had made him blue-eyed, and traces of English and some Dutch.  A brood of races that were forever at war within him.  And he had been a musician in the bargain, and this in the face of an implacable father who dealt in hides and tallow.  There had been all the weakness and flaming and naivete of a potential artist ground under the heel of a relentless sire.  His mother was long since dead.  The father had attempted to force the stream of desire from music to business.  He had succeeded, after a fashion, but the youth had learned to escape from the dull pain of his slavery into a rosy and wine-red Eden. ...  Three times he had been sent to Fairview “to kick the nonsense out of him!” to use his father’s words.  He was not embittered nor overwhelmed, but he was passive, stubbornly passive, as if he had all a lifetime to cross words with Monet, senior.  It was inevitable that he would win in the end.  He was a child ... he always would be one ... and childhood might be cowed, but it was never really conquered.  He was gentle, too, like a child, and sensitive.