The clock struck three.  Carl’s brain, flaming, keen, master of the bottle save for its subtle inspiration of wounded pride and resentment, brooded morosely over Diane, over the defection of his parasitic companions, over the final leap into the abyss of parsimony and Diane’s flash of contempt at the mention of his mother.  Half of Diane’s money was rightly his—­his mother’s portion.  And he could love vehemently, cleanly, if he willed, with the delicate white fire which few men were fine enough to know. . . .  In the soft hollow of Diane’s hand had lain the destiny of a man who had the will to go unerringly the way he chose. . . .  Love and hunger—­they were the great trenchant appetites of the human race:  one for its creation, the other for its perpetuation. . . .  To every man came first the call of passion; then the love-hunger for a perfect mate.  The latter had come to him to-night as Diane stood in the doorway, a slender, vibrant flame of life keyed exquisitely for the finer, subtler things and hating everything else.

Still he drank, but the fires of hell were rising now in his eyes.  There was treachery in the bottle. . . .  Diane, he chose to fancy, had refused him justice, salvation, respect to the memory of his mother! . . .  So be it! . . .  His to wrench from the mocking, gold-hungry world whatever he could and however he would. . . .  Only his mother had understood. . . .  And Diane had mocked her memory.  Still there had been thrilling moments of tenderness for him in Diane’s life. . . .  But Diane was like that—­a flash of fire and then bewildering sweetness.  There was the spot Starrett’s glass had struck; there the ancient carven chair in which Diane had mocked his mother; there was red—­blood-red in the dying log—­and gold.  Blood and gold—­they were indissolubly linked one with the other and the demon of the bottle had danced wild dances with each of them.  A mad trio!  After all, there was only one beside his mother who had ever understood him—­Philip Poynter, his roommate at Yale.  And Philip’s lazy voice somehow floated from the fire to-night.

“Carl,” he had said, “you’ve bigger individual problems to solve than any man I know.  You could head a blood revolution in South America that would outrage the world; or devise a hellish philosophy of hedonism that by its very ingenuity would seduce a continent into barking after false gods.  You’ve an inexplicable chemistry of ungovernable passions and wild whims and you may go through hell first but when the final test comes—­you’ll ring true.  Mark that, old man, you’ll ring true.  I tell you I know!  There’s sanity and will and grit to balance the rest.”

Well, Philip Poynter was a staunch optimist with oppressive ideals, a splendid, free-handed fellow with brains and will and infernal persistence.