eal glances at him. Where he needn't speak to any one from
morning till night. Where he could really get himself together and
think.

He added in a postscript to the note to Craig, instructions to call up
his house and tell them he was out of town.

The thought cropped up in one of the more automatic sections of his
brain, that for traveling he ought to have a bag, night things, fresh
underclothes, and so on, and the routine method of supplying that need
suggested itself to him; namely, to telephone to the house, have one of
the maids pack his bag for him and send it down-town in the car. But
just as he had rejected the notion of breakfasting at home, and had gone
out to that miserable Clark Street lunch-room instead, so he rejected
this. All the small civilized refinements of his way of life went
utterly against his grain. They'd continue to be intolerable to him, he
thought, as long as he had to go on envisaging Rose in that ghastly
environment of hers.

He left his office and turned into one of the big department stores that
backs up on Dearborn Street, where he bought himself a cheap bag and
furnished it with a few necessaries. Then, leaving the store, simply
kept on going to the first railway station that lay in his way. He chose
a destination quite at random. The train announcer, with a megaphone,
was calling off a list of towns which a train, on the point of
departure, would stop at. Rodney picked one that he had never visited,
bought a ticket, walked down the platform past the Pullmans, and found
himself a seat in a coach.

He found a measure of relief in all this. It gave him the illusion, at
least, of doing something. Or, more accurately, of getting ready to do
something, while it liberated him from the immediate necessity of doing
it. He'd go to a hotel in that town whose name was printed on his
ticket, and hire a room; lock himself up in it, and then begin to think.
Once he could get the engine of his mind to going, he'd be all right.
There must be some right thing to do. Or if not that, at least something
that was better to do than anything else. And when his mind should have
discovered what that thing was, he'd have, he felt, resolution enough to
go on and do it. Until he should find it, he was like a man
shamed--naked, unable to encounter the most casual glance of any of the
persons in his world who knew his shame. Once he was safe in that hotel
room, the process of thinking could begin. He wouldn't h