ice, as he had seen
them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday supplement. A quick gust
of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was
startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel
driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty
overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the
concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between
him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he
wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were
destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to
come sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs,
explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that were
forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow
wallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box, and over
his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin,
and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red
worsted by his mother, whom Paul could not remember.

Half an hour later, Paul alighted from the Negley Avenue car and went
slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a
highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and
where business men of moderate means begot and reared large families
of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter
catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly
alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they
lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing.
His home was next the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it
tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of
sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had
when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the
waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he
experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the
loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house permeated by
kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourless
mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool