winding
itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York,
and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his
dressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up
from dinner,--but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the look
of it, anyway.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again
to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the
world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of
anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the
dark corner at last, and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there; but
somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything
clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he
had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he
sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so
he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab,
directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town.
The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open
fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks
projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul
dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind
a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual
picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every
feature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he had
bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his
ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable
to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly
at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the
ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on
his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as he
walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside,
where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped
and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; all
their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen
in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long
before this. It was only one sp