umbness grew again in
his head. All the objects in the range of his eyes seemed to move back
and stand on the same plane. He became a little dizzy.

"It's the _tobacco_," he exclaimed. "That pipe always was too strong."
He turned away to the open window, feeling an irresistible need of
distraction, of amusement, and he remained there resting on his elbows,
listening and looking, trying to be interested.

It was toward the middle of the afternoon. The morning mist was long
since evaporated and the first faint puffs of the inevitable trade wind
were just stirring the leaves of the eucalyptus across the street. In
the music-room of the white house the young lady of the family had
opened the piano and was practising finger-exercises. The scales and
arpeggios following one another without interruption, came to his ears
in a pleasant monotone. A Chinese "boy" in a stiff blouse of white
linen, made a great splashing as he washed down the front steps with a
bucket of water and the garden hose. Grocery and delivery wagons came
and went, rattling over the cobbles and car-tracks, while occasionally a
whistle blew very far off. At the corner of the street by a
livery-stable a little boy in a flat-topped leather cap was calling
incessantly for some unseen dog, whistling and slapping his knees. An ex
press-wagon stopped a few doors below the white house and the driver
pulled down the back-board with a strident rattle of chains; the cable
in its slot kept up an unceasing burr and clack while the cars
themselves trundled up and down the street, starting and stopping with a
jangling of bells, the jostled glass windows whirring in a prolonged
vibrant note. All these sounds played lightly over the steady muffled
roar that seemed to come from all quarters at once; it was that deep
murmur, that great minor diapason that always disengages itself from
vast bodies, from mountains, from oceans, from forests, from sleeping
armies.

The desire for movement, for diversion, for anything that would keep him
from thinking was not to be resisted. Vandover caught up his hat and
fled from the room, not daring to look again at the easel. Once outside,
he began to walk, anywhere, straight before him, going on with great
strides, his head in the air.

He found Charlie Geary and took him to supper. Vandover talked
continually on all sorts of subjects, speaking very rapidly. In the
evening he insisted on Geary going to the theatre with him. He paid the