What they believed and endured and wrought and achieved seemed now not only hopelessly beyond any comprehension or attainment of his, but even beyond hope of humble discipleship.
And always, horribly, like an obsession, was creeping over him in these days the conviction of some similarity between his work and the thin, clear, clever brush-work of Allaire--with all its mastery of ways and means, all its triumph over technical difficulties, all its tricks and subtle appeals, and its falsity, and its glamour.
Reflection, retrospection sickened him.

It was snowing and growing late when he wrote to a steamship agent making inquiries and asking for plans of staterooms.
Then he had tea, alone there in the early winter dusk, with the firelight playing over Gladys who sat in the full heat of the blaze, licking her only kitten, embracing its neck with one maternal paw.
He dressed about six, intending to dine somewhere alone that New Year's Eve.

The somewhere, as usual, ended at the Syrinx Club--or rather at the snowy portal--for there he collided with Samuel Strathclyde Ogilvy and Henry Knickerbocker Annan, and was seized and compelled to perform with them on the snowy sidewalk, a kind of round dance resembling a pow-wow, which utterly scandalised the perfectly respectable club porter, and immensely interested the chauffeurs of a row of taxicabs in waiting.
"Come! Let up! This isn't the most dignified performance I ever assisted at," he protested.
"Who said it was dignified ?" demanded Ogilvy.

"We're not hunting for dignity.

Harry and I came here in a hurry to find an undignified substitute for John Burleson.