and his proximity pressed on Ralph with the mounting pang of physical
nausea.

"THIS man...THIS man..." he couldn't get beyond the thought: whichever
way he turned his haggard thought, there was Moffatt bodily blocking the
perspective...Ralph's eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on
the desk beside Moffatt's hand. Faugh! That such a hand should have
touched it!

Suddenly he heard himself speaking. "Before my marriage--did you know
they hadn't told me?"

"Why, I understood as much..."

Ralph pushed on: "You knew it the day I met you in Mr. Spragg's office?"

Moffatt considered a moment, as if the incident had escaped him. "Did we
meet there?" He seemed benevolently ready for enlightenment. But Ralph
had been assailed by another memory; he recalled that Moffatt had dined
one night in his house, that he and the man who now faced him had sat at
the same table, their wife between them... He was seized with another
dumb gust of fury; but it died out and left him face to face with the
uselessness, the irrelevance of all the old attitudes of appropriation
and defiance. He seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited
prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour... Moffatt still sat at
his desk, unmoved and apparently uncomprehending. "He doesn't even
know what I'm feeling," flashed through Ralph; and the whole archaic
structure of his rites and sanctions tumbled down about him.

Through the noise of the crash he heard Moffatt's voice going on without
perceptible change of tone: "About that other matter now...you can't
feel any meaner about it than I do, I can tell you that... but all we've
got to do is to sit tight..."

Ralph turned from the voice, and found himself outside on the landing,
and then in the street below.

XXXVI

He stood at the corner of Wall Street, looking up and down its hot
summer perspective. He noticed the swirls of dust in the cracks of the
pavement, the rubbish in the gutters, the ceaseless stream of perspiring
faces that poured by under tilted hats.

He found himself, next, slipping northward between the glazed walls of
the Subway, another languid crowd in the seats about him and the nasal
yelp of the stations ringing through the car like some repeated ritual
wail. The blindness within him seemed to have intensified his physical
perceptions, his sensitiveness to the heat, the noise, the smells of the
dishevelled midsummer city; but combined with the acuter perception of
th