They had had a great old talk that night, Frederica and he, he remembered.  He remembered what he had talked about, and he smiled grimly over the recollection—­space and leisure; the defective intelligence that trapped men into cluttering their lives with useless junk; so many things to have and to do that they couldn’t turn around without breaking something.  Had he been a fool then, or was he a fool now?  Both, perhaps.  But how old Frederica must have grinned over the naivete of him.  Which of the two of him in her candid opinion would be the better man?

He believed he could answer that question.  Oh, he was succeeding all right—­increasing his practise, making money, getting cautious—­prudent; he didn’t bolt the track any more.  And the quality of his work was good, he couldn’t quarrel with that.  Only, the old big free dreams that had glorified it, were gone.  He was in harness, drawing a cart; following a bundle of hay.

He sprang impatiently to his feet, thrust back his chair so violently as he did so that it tipped over with a crash.  The one really footling, futile, fool thing to do, was what he was doing now—­lamenting his old way of life and making no effort to recapture it!  Let him either accept the situation, make up his mind to it and stop complaining, or else offer it some effective resistance—­sweep the flummery out of his life—­clear decks for action.

Well, and that was the most asinine consideration of all.  Because of course he couldn’t do one thing or the other.  As long as the man who wasn’t Rose’s husband remained alive in him, he’d protest—­struggle—­clamor for his old freedom.  And yet, as long as the million tiny cords that bound hum, Gulliver-like, went back to Rose, talk of breaking them was sophomoric foolishness.  He’d better go home!

The building was pretty well deserted by now, and against the silence he heard the buzzer in his telephone switchboard proclaiming insistently that some one was trying to get him on the telephone.  His hour of recollection hadn’t been a success, but the invasion of it irritated him none the less.  He thought at first he wouldn’t answer.  He didn’t care who was on the wire.  He didn’t want to talk to anybody.  But no one can resist the mechanical bell-ringers they use in exchanges nowadays—­the even-spaced ring and wait, ring and wait, so manifestly incapable of discouragement.  At the end of forty-five seconds, he snatched open his door, punched the jack into its socket, caught up the head-piece, and bellowed, “Hello!” into the dangling transmitter.

And then the look of annoyance in his face changed to one of incredulous pleasure.  “Good God!” he said.  “Is that you, Barry Lake?  Are you here in Chicago?  And Jane, too?  How long you going to be here?...  Lord, but that’s immense!”