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“You’re too generous and loyal, Stacey,” Blair returned, with a shake of his fair head. “I couldn’t ever reach your delicacy in detail.”

“Detail, yes,” Stacey muttered. “I—” He, too, shook his head, while his friend gazed at him with a calm clear smile. “Lack of vulgarity is the curse of more places than the Beaux Arts,” Stacey concluded suddenly. “There’s a brand-new thought for you—brand-new so far as I’m concerned. Make what you can of it, Phil.”

Philip Blair laughed. “Sounds interesting,” he said. “I’ll have to think it over. Anyhow, you needn’t worry about me. I manage to scrape enough together to live and keep Catherine and the boys going.”

“Where are the kiddies?”

“Out for a walk with her. They’ll be in soon.”

After this a silence, that perhaps both young men had felt lying in wait, descended upon them. Blair was the first to meet frankly what it stood for.

“So you’re going over into it, Stacey,” he said.

Stacey nodded. “I’ve got to.”

“Well,” said Blair slowly, after another pause, “I suppose, in view of the tremendous issue, I ought to feel principally gladness that one bit more of strength and courage is thrown into the right side of the balance. But, do you know, I don’t—I can’t. Perhaps it’s because I’m not big enough to get away from personal feelings. And yet I don’t think it’s merely that. The truth is, Stacey, that you and I are individualists. We were born like that and we’ve been brought up that way. The profession we’ve chosen is individualistic—not perfectly so, because we have to meet the ideas of our clients; but a good deal so, all the same. For the very fact that people in general are so standardized, unindividual, wanting in ideas of their own, makes them leave pretty much in our hands the houses they hire us to build for them.”