ey were too polite to sneer. Erik knew about the stars and the
mixed-up things, the dim things old senses could feel in the night
though he chose to laugh at them.

But one thing Erik didn't know, and the old man, turning from his chair,
grew sad. What was that? What? His thought mumbled a question. Sitting
motionless in a corner of the room he could smile at Erik and his smile
under the white beard seemed to give an answer to the mumble--an answer
that irritated his son. The answer said, "Wait, wait! it is too early
for you to say you have lived." What a son, what a son! whose eyes made
fun of his father's white hair.

The old man moved slowly as if his infirmities were no more than
meditations, and entered the house.

CHAPTER II

The crowds moving through the streets gave Erik Dorn a picture. It was
morning. Above the heads of the people the great spatula-topped
buildings spread a zigzag of windows, a scribble of rooftops against the
sky. A din as monotonous as a silence tumbled through the streets--an
unvarying noise of which the towering rectangles of buildings tilted
like great reeds out of a narrow bowl, seemed an audible part.

The city alive with signs, smoke, posters, windows; falling, rising,
flinging its chimneys and its streets against the sun, wound itself up
into crowds and burst with an endless bang under the far-away sky.

Moving toward his office Erik Dorn watched the swarming of men and women
of which he was a part. Faces like a flight of paper scraps scattered
about him. Bodies poured suddenly across his eyes as if emptied out of
funnels. The ornamental entrances of buildings pumped figures in and
out. Vague and blurred like the play of gusty rain, the crowds darkened
the pavements.

Dorn saluted the spectacle with smiling eyes. As always, in the aimless
din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home.
The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and
unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a
geometrical emptiness of life.

Here before him the meanings of faces vanished. The greedy little
purposes of men and women tangled themselves into a generality. It was
thus Dorn was most pleased to look upon the world, to observe it as one
observes a pattern--involved but precise. Life as a whole lay in the
streets--a little human procession that came toiling out of a yesterday
into an interminable to-morrow. It presented itself to h