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darkness he wasseized with an inexplicable feeling of terror. It seemed to come upon him, as though for the first time, that he was utterly alone in the world. “We are all of us alone,” he mumbled to himself, but even as he said it he could not help but feel that he was more alone than anyone else in the world.
    At least
, he told himself (he had been telling himself this repeatedly), there was nothing definite to worry about. Wasn’t there though? The more he endeavored to reassure himself, the more convinced he became that there lurked a sinister misfortune whose reality and imminence was expressing itself in these tenuous, shadowy forebodings. Little comfort was there in the thought that the ordeal might be of limited duration. The question was whether it did not constitute but a prelude to a final, uninterrupted isolation. The periods of suspense, which in the beginning had a plausible span of an hour or two, were now stretching out to truly incommensurable lapses of time. By what calculus could one measure the sheer cumulative agony between an hour’s wait and five? What could the passage of time, as indicated by the slow-moving hands of a clock, yield in problems of this sort?
    But there were explanations . . . ? Yes, of explanations there was no end. The air at times was blue with them. Yet nothing was explained. The very fact that there were explanations required explaining.
    His mind dwelt for a while on the complexities of that life which is lived in big cities—the
autumnal
cities—wherein there reigned an ordered disorder, a crazy justice, a cold disunity that permitted one individual to sit peacefully before his fireplace while a stone’s throw away another was foully murdered. A city, he said to himself, is like a universe, eachblock a whirling constellation, each home a blazing star, or a burned-out planet. The warm, gregarious life, the smoke and the prayers, the clamor and parade, the whole bloody show was pivoted on a fulcrum of fear. If a man could love his neighbor he might have respect for himself; if he could have faith he might attain peace—but how,
how
, in a universe of bricks, a madhouse of egotists, an atmosphere of turmoil, strife, terror, violence? For the man of the autumnal cities there was left only the vision of the great whore, mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.
These shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire
. That was the revelation for the spiritually dead . . . chapter the last . . . book of books.
    So absorbed was he in his reverie that when suddenly he turned his head, saw her standing at the threshold, he almost collapsed.
    B ENEATH HER purple smock she was nude. He held her at arm’s length and gazed at her long, intently.
    â€œWhy do you look at me like that?” she gasped, still breathless.
    â€œI was thinking how different . . .”
    â€œYou’re going to begin that again?”
    â€œNo,” he said quietly, “I’m not going to harp on it, but . . . well, look here, Hildred, sometimes you do look frightful, simply
frightful
. You can look worse than a whore when you try.” (He lacked the courage to say plump out: “Where were you?” or “What have you been doing all this time?”)
    She went to the bathroom to reappear almost immediately with a small bottle of olive oil and a Turkish towel. Spilling afew drops of the oil into the palm of her hand, she proceeded forthwith to smear her face with it. The soft, spongy nap of the towel absorbed the dirt and grease which had collected in her pores. It looked like a rag on which an artist wipes his brushes.
    â€œWeren’t you worried about me?” she asked.
    â€œOf course I was.”
    â€œOf course!
What a way to put it! And no sooner do I arrive than you tell me I look like a whore . . . worse than a whore.”
    â€œYou know I didn’t call you a