appallingly detailed record of infractions of international law. Every fish that had ever been caught in an alien net seemed to be down on the list. And I'm one of the millions of them, he was thinking, as he realized that it had become, forever, his conservative and aristocratic duty to pepper these soggy reports with semicolons and circumflex accents. This, he reflected, is what you get for not being an artist; this constitutes the dignity of labor—oh, Mr. Carlyle!
But when he had outgrown the feeling of intrusion with which he had at first entered the hive, he experienced a sensation which was in many ways agreeable. For a great weight rolled away when one was reduced to the simple necessity of fulfilling mechanical orders, with all the responsibilities of the day left to superior officers.
But by Christmas time the routine had grown irksome, the statistics tedious in the extreme, the relaxation intolerable. In intervals between his monotonous tasks, he caught himself listening again, as of old, to the whispered clamors within himself, desperately trying to find the locus of a simmering and effervescing that could only, there was no doubting it, be attributable to a creative mutiny. A year ago a similar interior rumble had filled him with eager elation; now it filled him with dread. Bit by bit he was forced to the acknowledgment that he had again played himself false. The avalanche that had occurred within him at the discovery of Olga's betrayal had carried away,
