orld was fighting for, he reflected; this was
what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Had
he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged
looking business men boarded the early car? Mere rivets in a machine they
seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with combings of children's hair always
hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes.
Cordelia Street--Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Had
he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as
far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such
shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this
one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to
meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to
look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties
were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in
his loge at the Opera. He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of
his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself
different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings
explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it
passively. He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassure
himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that
night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window.
When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom;
partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should
wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no
horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin
above his bed.

On Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted
late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy,
a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over
Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town,
and the two boys went off together after dinner, not returning to the
hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the
confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the
elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to
make his train, and Pau