Chapter II Summary

The narrator and his friend John Stuart were sharing a drink close to Boston City Hall. John worked for the Sun and they discussed Frank Munsey, failures in the Rockefeller Institute research labs, literature departments at Universities, and so on. Their fascination was not with big failures but those pushed into a prominent place but too week and stupid to make a difference with it.

John, apparently, is a scholastic, a philosopher following St. Thomas Aquinas. The conversation turns to true happiness when a man pipes up and tells them that he knows a man who is so happy as to be almost insane. The man, Stevens, was the superintendent of a new thirty-story building named Tootsall. Stevens introduced the narrators to Blue.

Blue was tall, young and had dark, intense eyes coupled with a relaxed and 'easy' smile. He desired...