im as a
picture--legs moving against the walls of buildings, diagonals of
bodies, syncopating face lines.

Things that made pictures for his eyes alone diverted Dorn. Beyond this
capacity for diversion he remained untouched. He walked smiling into
crowds, oblivious of the lesser destinations of faces, pleased to dream
of his life and the life of others as a movement of legs, a bobbing of
heads.

His appreciation of crowds was typical. In the same manner he held an
appreciation of all things in life and art which filled him with the
emotion of symmetry. He had given himself freely to his tastes. A creed
had resulted. Rhythm that was intricate pleased him more than the
metronomic. In art, the latter was predominant. In life, the former. Out
of these decisions he achieved almost a complete indifference to
literature and especially toward painting. No drawn picture stirred him
to the extent that did the tapestry of a city street. No music aroused
the elation in him that did the curious beat upon his eyes of window
rows, of vari-shaped building walls whose oblongs and squares translated
themselves in his thought into a species of unmelodious but perfect
sound.

The preoccupation with form had developed in him as complement of his
nature. The nature of Erik Dorn was a shallows. Life did not live in
him. He saw it as something eternally outside. To himself he seemed at
times a perfect translation of his country and his day.

"I'm like men will all be years later," he said to his wife, "when their
emotions are finally absorbed by the ingenious surfaces they've
surrounded themselves with, and life lies forever buried behind the
inventions of engineers, scientists, and business men."

Normal outwardly, a shrewd editor and journalist, functioning daily in
his home and work as a cleverly conventional figure, Dorn had lived
since boyhood in an unchanging vacuum. He had in his early youth become
aware of himself. As a young man he had waited half consciously for
something to happen to him. He thought of this something as a species of
contact that would suddenly overtake him. He would step into the street
and find himself a citizen absorbed by responsibilities, ideas,
sympathies, prejudices. But the thing had never happened. At thirty he
had explained to himself, "I am complete. This business of being empty
is all there is to life. Intelligence is a faculty which enables man to
peer through the muddle of ideas and arrive at a no