confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure,
and even have opinions of their own, but always he
talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among
the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king
he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in
the city of New York.

Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get
lonely and to want to touch actual flesh-and-bone
people with his hands. Days passed when his room seemed
empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his
mind. At night strange fevers, burning within, kept him
awake. He married a girl who sat in a chair next to his
own in the art school and went to live in an apartment
house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the woman
he married, and Enoch got a job in a place where
illustrations are made for advertisements.

That began another phase of Enoch's life. He began to
play at a new game. For a while he was very proud of
himself in the role of producing citizen of the world.
He dismissed the essence of things and played with
realities. In the fall he voted at an election and he
had a newspaper thrown on his porch each morning. When
in the evening he came home from work he got off a
streetcar and walked sedately along behind some
business man, striving to look very substantial and
important. As a payer of taxes he thought he should
post himself on how things are run. "I'm getting to be
of some moment, a real part of things, of the state and
the city and all that," he told himself with an amusing
miniature air of dignity. Once, coming home from
Philadelphia, he had a discussion with a man met on a
train. Enoch talked about the advisability of the
government's owning and operating the railroads and the
man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that such a
move on the part of the government would be a good
thing, and he grew quite excited as he talked. Later he
remembered his own words with pleasure. "I gave him
something to think about, that fellow," he muttered to
himself as he climbed the stairs to his Brooklyn
apartment.

To be sure, Enoch's marriage did not turn out. He
himself brought it to an end. He began to feel choked
and walled in by the life in the apartment, and to feel
toward his wife and even toward his children as he had
felt concerning the friends who once came to visit him.
He began to tell little lies about business engagements
that would give him freedom to walk alone in the street
at night and, the chanc