Clancy all seemed obviously insane.
One by one they filed into the room. Fred followed. Twelve spotlessly
clean cots gleamed in the twilight.

The twelve men crawled into bed; the door was shut with a bang. Fred
heard a key turn... They were locked in!

The ghostly day faded and night settled in. Fitful snorings and groans
and incoherent mutterings broke the stillness. At intervals a man near
the door would jump to his feet, proclaiming the end of the world.
Sometimes his paroxysm was brief, but again he would keep up his
leaping and solemn chanting until he fell to the floor in sheer
exhaustion... Gradually even he became quiet, and nothing was audible
except heavy breathing and the sound of the watchman in the corridor
as he passed by regularly, flashing his light into the room through
the slits in the door.

Fred Starratt did not close his eyes.

CHAPTER XIII

The first week passed in an inferno of idleness. Fred Starratt grew to
envy even the wretches who were permitted to carry swill to the pigs.
There once had been a time in his life when ambition had pricked him
with a desire for affluent ease... He had been grounded in the
religious conviction that work had been wished upon a defenseless
humanity as a curse. He still remembered his Sabbath-school stories,
particularly the scornful text with which the Lord had banished those
two erring souls from Eden. Henceforth they were to work! To earn
their bread by the sweat of their brows! He had a feeling now that
either God had been tricked into granting a boon or else the scowl
which had accompanied the tirade had been the scowl that a genial
Father threw at his children merely for the sake of seeming
impressive. At heart the good Lord must have had only admiration for
these two souls who refused to be beguiled by all the slothful ease of
Eden, preferring to take their chances in a world of their own
making... And he began to question, too, either the beauty or
contentment of the heaven which offered the vacuous delights of
idleness. It seemed, perhaps, that the theologians had mixed their
revelations, and that the paradise they offered so glibly was really a
sinister hell in disguise.

After the first day the sights which had sent shudders through him
gradually began to assume the inevitability of custom. Even the vision
of the Weeping Willow, sorrowing at death withheld, failed to shake
him. The third night he slept undisturbed in the lap of frenzy