ows and to
fasten helplessly upon their causes. And here lay the ludicrous--the
clownish little mainspring of tragedy and drama. He moved through his
day with a vivid understanding of its excitements. There was no mystery.
One had only to look and see and words fitted themselves. A pattern
twisted itself into precisions--precisions of men loving, hating,
questing. The understanding swayed him between pity and contempt and
left the balance of an amused smile in his eyes.

Intimacy with Erik Dorn had meant different things to different people,
but all had derived from his friendship a fascinated feeling of loss.
His wife, closest to him, had after seven years found herself drained,
hollowed out as by some tenaciously devouring insect. Her mind had
emptied itself of its normal furniture. Erik had eaten the ideas out of
it. Under the continual impact of his irony her faiths and
understandings had slowly deserted her. Her thought had become a shadow
cast by his emptiness. Things were no longer good, no longer bad. People
had become somehow non-existent for her since she could no longer think
of them as symbols incarnate of ideas that she liked or ideas that she
disliked. Thus emptied of its natural furniture, her mind had borrowed
from her heart and become filled, wholly occupied with the emotion of
her love for Erik Dorn. More than lover and husband, he was an
obsession. He had replaced a world for her.

It was of his wife that Dorn was thinking when he arrived this summer
morning at his desk in the editorial room. He had remembered suddenly
that the day was the anniversary of their marriage. Time had passed
rapidly. Seven years! Like seven yesterdays. He seemed able to remember
them in their entirety with a single thought, as one can remember a
column of figures without recalling either their meaning or their sum.

CHAPTER III

The employees of the editorial room--a loft-like chamber crazily crowded
with desks, tables, cabinets, benches, files, typewriters; lighted by a
smoke-darkened sun and the dim glow of electric bulbs--were already
launched upon the nervous routine of their day. An excited jargon filled
the place which, with the air of physical disorder as if the workers
were haphazardly improvising their activities,--gave the room a vivid
though seemingly impermanent life.

On the benches against a peeling wall sleepy-faced boys with precocious
eyes kept up a lazy hair-pulling, surreptitious wrestling bo