His heart leaped. He surveyed her appraisingly, feeling a new joy in the poetry of life. Here was a woman who had meaning. One could understand why she existed, not cumbering the earth, gracing it—beautiful. Ah, the gracious, exquisite reality of her waddling legless form! There she was—a woman. He was jostled, almost pushed from the kerb as he stared. He drew a banknote, his last, from his pocket, and hurried after her. He pressed it into her hand. The hand, a claw, closed over it. She shambled on without a glance at him.
He felt elated, and suddenly rather hungry. A row of people sitting on high stools before a counter in a drug store attracted him. He went in. There was only one empty stool, between two young girls. He would not take it, but stood waiting until there was a space at the end, beside an elderly man. He ordered tomato soup and wafers. As he drooped over the mug containing the thick liquid, which tasted as though it were of the tinned variety, a fit of coughing came on him. He had difficulty in suppressing it, and, by the time he had, his appetite was gone. He drank the rest of the soup, but left the wafers. Out in the street he found that there was now a faint movement of air. He entered the little garden in Madison Square, sat down on one of the benches, and lighted a cigarette. A feeling of extreme lassitude crept over him, from the legs upward, at last reaching his head and making him drowsy. The figures passing through the park became shadowy. He saw as in a dream the twilight arch of the sky, the far-off hazy moon, the rows of lights, like strings of bright beads in the surrounding buildings.
He was weary with a deep sickness of dejection. He remembered his young strength, his gifts—and they had come to this! And he was twenty-five! Surely he was held in derision of the gods. He remembered Jalna, his brothers, Alayne. He had harmed them all in one way or another, he supposed. But he did not think of them clearly. Himself only he saw with great clarity. His own white face, like the face of a drowning man, risen for a moment on the crest of a wave.
