This unexpected resurgance within him of the social instinct, he made no attempt to account for to others or to himself.

He had developed a mental and physical restlessness, which was not yet entirely nervous, but it had become sufficiently itching to stir him out of fatigue when the long day's work had ended--enough to drive him out of the studio--at first merely to roam about at hazard through the livelier sections of the city.

But to the lonely, there is no lonelier place than a lively one; and the false brilliancy and gaiety drove him back upon himself and into his lair again, where for a while he remained meditating amid the sombre menace of looming canvases and the heavy futility of dull-gold hangings, and the mischievous malice of starlight splintering into a million incandescent rainbow rays through the sheet of glass above.
Out of this, after some days, he emerged, set in motion by his increasing restlessness.

And it shoved him in the direction of his kind once more--and in the direction of other kinds.
He dined at his sister's in Seventy-ninth Street near Madison Avenue; he dined with the Grandcourts on Fifth Avenue; he decorated a few dances, embellished an opera box now and then, went to Lakewood and Tuxedo for week ends, rode for a few days at Hot Springs, frequented his clubs, frequented Stephanie, frequented Maxim's.
And all the while it seemed to him as though he were temporarily enduring something which required patience, which could not last forever, which must one day end in a great change, a complete transformation for himself, of himself, of the world around him and of his aim and hope and purpose in living.

At moments, too, an odd sensation of expectancy came over him--the sense of waiting, of suppressed excitement.