Darrow threw back his great head with a laugh.  “I don’t reckon she did mention it, bless her!  It don’t bear mentioning even now.  Why, when she went back last fall to see those houses, she found that the tenants had all moved into dirty little places in the alley, and were letting out the apartments, at five times the rent they paid, to other tenants.  They were doing a little special profiteering of their own—­and, bless your life, there wasn’t so much as a blade of grass left in the yards, even the trees had been cut down and sold for wood.  And you say she never mentioned it?”

“How could she?  But, after all, I suppose the question goes deeper than that?”

“The question,” replied Darrow, with an energy that shook the little car, “goes as deep as hell!”

They were driving rapidly up Grace Street; and as they shot past the club on the corner, Stephen noticed the serene aristocratic profile of Peyton at one of the brilliantly lighted windows.  A little farther on, when they turned into Franklin Street, he saw that the old print shop was in darkness, except for the lights in the rooms of the caretaker and the lodgers in the upper storey.  Corinna had gone home, he supposed, and he wondered idly if she were with Benham?  As they went on they passed the house of the Blairs, where he caught a glimpse of Margaret on the porch, parting from the handsome young clergyman.  The sight stirred him strangely, as if the memory of his dead life had been awakened by a scent or a faded flower in a book.  How different he was from the boy Margaret had known in that primitive period which people defined as “before the war”!  It was as if he had belonged then to some primary emotional stratum of life.  All the complex forces, the play and interplay of desire and repulsion, of energy and lassitude, had developed in the last two or three years.

On either side, softly shaded lights were shining from the windows, and women, in rich furs, were getting out of luxurious cars.  It was the world that Stephen knew; life moulded in sculptural forms and encrusted with the delicate patina of tradition.  Here was all that he had once loved; yet he realized suddenly, with a sensation of loneliness, that here, not in the mean streets, he felt, as Vetch would have said, “stranger than Robinson Crusoe.”  Something was missing.  Something was lost that he could never recover.  Was it Vetch, after all, who had shown him the way out, who had knocked a hole in the wall?

When Darrow stopped the car before the Culpeper gate, Stephen turned and held out his hand.  “Thank you,” he said simply.  “I shall see you again.”

Crossing the pavement with a rapid step, he entered the gate and ran up the steps to the porch between the white columns.  As he passed into the richly tempered glow of the hall, it seemed to him that an invisible force, an aroma of the past, drifted out of the old house and enveloped him like the sweetness of flowers.  He was caught again, he was submerged, in the spirit of race.