The morning after his first lesson with Paul Moody, Harold's mail contained an envelope which he tore open in febrile haste. Within the envelope he found a sheet of folded note-paper, but there was no writing thereon. The paper merely served as a garment for a crisp new one hundred dollar bill. Not a word! She had already thanked him, he recalled, but she might have found the heart to say something more. His life, begun so pleasantly on his first day in New York, now seemed to be caught in a perilous and inextricable tangle. The matchless Alice Blake had vanished, while a more motley crew than he had imagined could exist outside of literature had taken official possession of him. These wasters, apparently, incessantly staggered about seeking sensation. They had, it would appear, no other consistent aim. Sensation, in itself, was at the farthest pole from Harold's true desire. What he thought he wanted was a little grey home in the east with Alice Blake. Instead, he had been delivered, uncompromisingly, by an eccentric father, whom he was beginning to hate, into the hands of Paul Moody, a strange, cynical
