e for his deadened nerves. Inside the flabby, coarsened body with
its red face munching out monosyllables, lived a recluse. "Too much
living has driven him from life," Dorn thought, "and killed his lusts.
So he sits and reads books--the last debauchery: strange, twisted
phrases like idols, like totem poles, like Polynesian masks. He sits
contemplating them as he once sat drunkenly watching the obscenities of
black, white, and yellow bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of
life, for the grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes in him from
bestiality to asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bacchanal of flesh,
to-day a bacchanal of words ... the posturings of courtezans and the
posturings of ornate phrases become the same." He heard Crowley
repeating, "Damned idiot, Egan! No sense of human values. Crowded the
best story of the day off page one." ... Some day he'd have a long talk
with Crowley. But the man was so carefully hidden behind perfunctories
it was hard to get at him. He resented intrusion.

Dorn passed on and looked around for Warren--a humorous and didactic
creature who had with considerable effort destroyed his Boston accent
and escaped the fact that he had once earned his living as professor of
sociology in an eastern university. Dorn caught a memory of him sitting
in a congenial saloon before a stein and pouring forth hoarsely oracular
comments upon the activities of men known and unknown. The man had a
gift for caricature--Rabelaisean exaggerations. Dorn was suddenly glad
he had gone for the day. The office oppressed him and the people in it
were too familiar. He walked to his desk thinking of the South Seas and
new faces.

"I tell you what," a voice drawled behind him, "Nietzsche has it on the
whole lot of them." Cochran, the head of the copy desk, was talking--a
shriveled little man with a bald face and shoe-button eyes. "You've got
to admit people are more dishonest in their virtues than in their vices.
Of course, there's a lot of stuff he pulls that's impractical."

Dorn shrugged his shoulders, smiled and lifted his hat out of a locker.
He remembered again to telephone his wife, but instead moved out of the
office. A refreshing warmth in the street pleased his senses and he
turned toward the lake. Walk down Michigan avenue, take a taxi
home--what else was there to do? Nothing, unless talk. But to whom? He
thought of his father. A tenacious old man. Probably hang on forever.
God, the man had been