OWEN CAREY
with her hat, and a bottle of milk, and some slices of boiled ham from a delicatessen shop, and a loaf of bread, and a greasy paper bag of potato chips. He moved an empty box to the side of the bed and arranged the food on it, but he did not waken her. It would be better to let her rest.
He took off his wet coat, removed the cooking-dishes from his pine table to the floor, and sat down in his kitchen-chair to write.
8
You see, he was already a professional. No amateur would have been able to write under the circumstances. The girl in the room, her misery, her uncanny trick of whining—not to mention his own discomforts of damp shoulders and soaked feet—these things would have distracted any one for whom work had not become a professional habit, any one to whom writing was not the essential activity of his life and the justification of his existence, as necessary to him as food, as consoling as tobacco, his refuge from every worry—from the struggle with reality, the obstinacy of circumstance, the intractable enmity of events that always contradicted imagination and falsified hope—the refuge to which he went to escape all the impotences of mortality as the religious go to prayer.
He began to shape up his newspaper article, with his hand in his hair, tugging at it thoughtfully as he wrote. (And it was this continual scalp-massage,
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