first--this hour and a half from every working day--but that was in the
early days of his experience in the city. Then he had been driven by
boundless energy and hope--the same energy and the same hope that had
brought him here from his little mid-western community in the first
place. Year by year, however, as custom calloused him to the only part
in life he seemed fit to play, he forgot about the waste of time in the
Interborough cars. Destiny, he said to himself, had hollowed out the
subway as the rut in which his life was ordained to travel; destiny had
condemned him inescapably to an underground roar.

He never confessed to anyone that he held the subway as the sign and
symbol of the rut into which his life had grown. There was, indeed,
nobody to whom he might impart such thoughts as he had about the deeper
meanings of life. When Mr. Neal first came to Fields, Jones &
Houseman's, timid and green from the country, he had been repelled by
the lack of interest in his new problems on the part of his fellow
clerks, and he had then put on for the first time that armor of
indifference which now clung to him with the familiarity of an
accustomed garment. Nor did he feel a greater kinship with the family in
the Bronx with which he lodged. They were at pains not to annoy him; he
kept apart from them.

Perhaps the pallid little clerk with the large grey eyes would have
become very lonesome if he had not eventually found a real interest in
life. This, then, was the manner and substance of his finding.

As he traveled back and forth on the subway morning and evening, day in
and day out, week after week, he wasted the hours much more completely
than most of his fellow travelers. The average subway passenger reads
his newspaper and forgets the world; he knows by some sixth sense when
the train has arrived at his station, and only then does he look up from
his reading. Mr. Neal seldom read newspapers. The blatancy, the
crassness of the daily prints revolted him. Perhaps there was another
reason, too, which Mr. Neal himself did not realize; perhaps the settled
selfishness which his manner of life had fixed upon him had destroyed a
natural craving for the so-called "human interest" that is spread over
the pages of the journals of the metropolis. He despised the little
brawls aired in the papers, the bickerings of politics, the fights and
strikes and broils of all humanity reflected in daily mirrors.

Self-deprived of the newspaper