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 implication. A man for whom the truth supplied so many tempting sources of humor had nothing to gain by dealing in petty untruths. Everything pointed to it, including the portrait in the house in Commonwealth Avenue which had brought a shadow across their last interview.

And just behind the image of Sophie, waiting to crowd it out and obsess his imagination, was the image of Olga. He kept arguing that a girl who was no more unusual than Olga had no right to uproot him, to fill his thoughts till he had no appetite for work, no vitality, no enthusiasm. Standing before the easel in his bedroom he thought alternately of Peñaverde's wizardly skill and of Casimir's unfathomable depths of sincerity, and he threw down his palette.

For a reason he could scarcely formulate he avoided Floss's noisy house. Every afternoon he felt drawn there, yet the journey half way accomplished he would turn and walk in another direction—aimlessly and for hours. The prospect of meeting Olga in the company of idle, chattering, shiny or shabby groups of wasters to whom love was no more symbolic than a game of poker, deterred him. Something vital, he recognized, had overtaken him. Perhaps the It that he had been half expecting for years. If he had only known how devastating to one's peace of mind this particular kind of exaltation could prove to be, he might have braced himself for it. But it was too late now; he was in the grip of a force as exhilarating, and as deadly, as the