ittal drabs and browns, with a
carpet and paper that nobody would remember, and chairs and tables as
impersonal as railway porters.

Darrow picked up the time-table and tossed it on to the table. Then he
rose to his feet, lit a cigar and went to the window. Through the rain
he could just discover the face of a clock in a tall building beyond the
railway roofs. He pulled out his watch, compared the two time-pieces,
and started the hands of his with such a rush that they flew past the
hour and he had to make them repeat the circuit more deliberately. He
felt a quite disproportionate irritation at the trifling blunder. When
he had corrected it he went back to his chair and threw himself down,
leaning back his head against his hands. Presently his cigar went out,
and he got up, hunted for the matches, lit it again and returned to his
seat.

The room was getting on his nerves. During the first few days, while
the skies were clear, he had not noticed it, or had felt for it only the
contemptuous indifference of the traveller toward a provisional shelter.
But now that he was leaving it, was looking at it for the last time,
it seemed to have taken complete possession of his mind, to be soaking
itself into him like an ugly indelible blot. Every detail pressed itself
on his notice with the familiarity of an accidental confidant: whichever
way he turned, he felt the nudge of a transient intimacy...

The one fixed point in his immediate future was that his leave was over
and that he must be back at his post in London the next morning. Within
twenty-four hours he would again be in a daylight world of recognized
activities, himself a busy, responsible, relatively necessary factor in
the big whirring social and official machine. That fixed obligation
was the fact he could think of with the least discomfort, yet for some
unaccountable reason it was the one on which he found it most difficult
to fix his thoughts. Whenever he did so, the room jerked him back into
the circle of its insistent associations. It was extraordinary with what
a microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all: the grimy carpet
and wallpaper, the black marble mantel-piece, the clock with a gilt
allegory under a dusty bell, the high-bolstered brown-counterpaned bed,
the framed card of printed rules under the electric light switch, and
the door of communication with the next room. He hated the door most of
all...

At the outset, he had felt no special sense of