“_Dear Phil: It has occurred to me that under present building conditions you might be having rather a struggle of it on your own in New York. I’m writing to know whether you would consider coming out here for a time—or permanently, if you can stand the place. I think I could find you a job with my old firm. You’d be a great acquisition for them, you’d bring a little more vulgarity into our—what’s the word?—etiolated architecture, and you could live through this difficult and expensive period without worrying about how to make both ends meet. Of course I know what your independence means to you, and I may be all wrong in assuming that you would consider abandoning it temporarily; but I figure that when the difficulty of existence passes a certain mark it becomes absorbing to the point of destroying most of one’s real life, and that this mark is pretty sure to be passed by any young man trying to be an architect on his own in New York City to-day._
“_I’ll add a postscript to-morrow morning after I’ve seen Parkins (the head of my firm)._
Stacey glanced the letter through swiftly, folded and addressed it, and laid it on the desk.
Then he went to bed and fell asleep at once.
Waking early the next morning he did not lie still through those moments of delicious indolence in which most men indulge themselves, but slipped out of bed immediately and into his cold bath.
His body responded to the shock glowingly. It was magnificently fit. The muscles of his back and abdomen rippled smoothly as he rubbed himself with the rough towel. One would justly have admired Stacey as a healthy handsome animal. And it may be that his obstinate distaste for speculation, his barely conscious, undeliberate desire to avoid thought, arose out of his animal instinct of self-preservation, was but the deep determination not to allow his strong sane body to be affected by his sick and twisted mind.
He took from the closet a pre-war suit of his, a soft gray, civilian suit, and in regarding it felt a keener joy than he had felt in stepping off the steamer or in seeing Phil and Catherine or in drinking champagne last evening—a keener joy, alas, than he felt when he had donned the clothes; for they did not seem natural and easy to his militarized body.