s were letting in the water and his scanty
overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the
concert hall were out and that the rain was driving in sheets between
him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what
he wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the
rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to
shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to
come sometime; his father in his nightclothes at the top of the stairs,
explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that
were forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow
wallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collarbox, and
over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John
Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in
red worsted by his mother.

Half an hour later Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down
one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly
respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and
where businessmen of moderate means begot and reared large families of
children, all of whom went to Sabbath school and learned the shorter
catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as
exactly alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which
they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of
loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He
approached it tonight with the nerveless sense Of defeat, the hopeless
feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had
always had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street
he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies
of living he experienced all the physical depression which follows a
debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house
penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless,
colorless mass of everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things
and soft lights and fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul
felt to the sight of it all: his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold
bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping
spigg