to him. He pulled his hand free and
fled to his tent.

Perhaps his fiercest gibe at himself was that he had had to play the
role of virgin Galahad rejecting love, which is praised in books and
ridiculed in clubs. He mocked at his sincere desire to be fair to Eve.
And between mockeries he strained to hear her moving beyond the
canvas partition. He was glad when the bandsmen came larruping home
from the dance.

Next day she went out of her way to be chilly to him. He did not woo
her friendship. He had resigned from the Great Riley Show, and he was
going--going anywhere, so long as he kept going.

CHAPTER XV

He had been a jolly mechanic again, in denim overalls and jumper and a
defiant black skull-cap with long, shiny vizor; the tender of the
motor-boat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up,
sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin, of Plato, parading past in
white flannels. He had muttered: "I don't want Them to know I've just
been bumming around. I'll go some place else. And I'll do something
worth while." Now he was on the train for New York, meditating
impersonally on his uselessness, considering how free of moss his
rolling had kept him. He could think of no particularly masterful plan
for accumulating moss. If he had not bought a ticket through to New
York he would have turned back, to seek a position in one of the great
automobile factories that now, this early autumn of 1906, were
beginning to distinguish Detroit. Well, he had enough money to last
for one week in New York. He would work in an automobile agency there;
later he would go to Detroit, and within a few years be president of a
motor company, rich enough to experiment with motor-boats and to laugh
at Howard Griffin or any other Platonian.

So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it
was in the evening, and, having fallen asleep at Poughkeepsie, he did
not awake till a brakeman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central
Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel, and drowsily, with
the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth
that overpower one who sleeps in a smoking-car, he staggered across
to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar
room with vulgar sounds of over-weary slumber.

But in the morning, when he stared along Forty-second Street; when he
breakfasted at a Childs' restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bath-room,
and realized that t