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 When the sun, striking in through their window, awakened them, often they lay and, merely by looking beyond the window and not seeing the frame, they gazed upon the sun rising from the water and felt themselves alone on the edge of Creation and they said that they alone lived fifty thousand years ago or a million ages away in time to come. Of course they could have it whatever they wished for one can argue any age, or any youth, to sky and water and sun.

October came with no change in the manner of life at the hotel except that the morning swim in the lake was omitted since the water was cold. The month brought a lull at the office. The closed-car models were in and being delivered; they were proving very satisfactory and David did not have to work so hard as in the summer.

He had plenty of energy and he had a feeling of laxness at not doing more and at spending evening after evening at dancing, at cards with the Vredicks, at a theater alone with Fidelia or in some party she got up. He enjoyed the evenings and he was doing so well that the expense of the frequent entertainments did not worry him but afterwards he felt guilty about them. He explained it as the result of his habit of doing double work in the fall when he used to be in college and working to support himself and for money to send home.

He missed something else which he could not feel more exactly than as an unexpected lack of full satisfaction in what he was doing. When he had been in the University and also dealing in secondhand cars,