Banneker would go forward in the fascinating paths of exploration; but there were other considerations.

The outer man, for example.  The inner man, too; the conscious inner man strengthened upon the strong milk of the philosophers, the priests, and the prophets so strangely mingled in that library now stored with Camilla Van Arsdale; exhilarated by the honey-dew of “The Undying Voices,” of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne’s supernal rhythms, which he had brought with him.  One visit to the Public Library had quite appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it.  He had gone there, hungry to chat about books!  To the Public Library!  Surely a Homeric joke for grim, tomish officialdom.  But tomish officialdom had not even laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such side-splitting innocence....  Was he likely to meet a like irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing for the body?

Watch the clubs, young Wickert had advised.  Banneker strolled up Fifth Avenue, branching off here and there, into the more promising side streets.

It was the hour of the First Thirst; the institutions which cater to this and subsequent thirsts drew steadily from the main stream of human activity flowing past.  Many gloriously clad specimens passed in and out of the portals, socially sacred as in the quiet Fifth Avenue clubs, profane as in the roaring, taxi-bordered “athletic” foundations; but there seemed to the anxious observer no keynote, no homogeneous character wherefrom to build as on a sure foundation.  Lacking knowledge, his instinct could find no starting-point; he was bewildered in vision and in mind.  Just off the corner of the quietest of the Forties, he met a group of four young men, walking compactly by twos.  The one nearest him in the second line was Herbert Cressey.  His heavy and rather dull eye seemed to meet Banneker’s as they came abreast.  Banneker nodded, half checking himself in his slow walk.

“How are you?” he said with an accent of surprise and pleasure.

Cressey’s expressionless face turned a little.  There was no response in kind to Banneker’s smile.

“Oh!  H’ware you!” said he vaguely, and passed on.

Banneker advanced mechanically until he reached the corner.  There he stopped.  His color had heightened.  The smile was still on his lips; it had altered, taken on a quality of gameness.  He did not shake his fist at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac’s threat in his own terms.

“I reckon I’ll have to lick this town and lick it good before it learns to be friendly.”

A hand fell on his arm.  He turned to face Cressey.

“You’re the feller that bossed the wreck out there in the desert, aren’t you?  You’re—­lessee—­Banneker.”

“I am.”  The tone was curt.