out and left him face to face with the uselessness, the irrelevance of all the old attitudes of appropriation and defiance.  He seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour...  Moffatt still sat at his desk, unmoved and apparently uncomprehending.  “He doesn’t even know what I’m feeling,” flashed through Ralph; and the whole archaic structure of his rites and sanctions tumbled down about him.

Through the noise of the crash he heard Moffatt’s voice going on without perceptible change of tone:  “About that other matter now...you can’t feel any meaner about it than I do, I can tell you that... but all we’ve got to do is to sit tight...”

Ralph turned from the voice, and found himself outside on the landing, and then in the street below.

XXXVI

He stood at the corner of Wall Street, looking up and down its hot summer perspective.  He noticed the swirls of dust in the cracks of the pavement, the rubbish in the gutters, the ceaseless stream of perspiring faces that poured by under tilted hats.

He found himself, next, slipping northward between the glazed walls of the Subway, another languid crowd in the seats about him and the nasal yelp of the stations ringing through the car like some repeated ritual wail.  The blindness within him seemed to have intensified his physical perceptions, his sensitiveness to the heat, the noise, the smells of the dishevelled midsummer city; but combined with the acuter perception of these offenses was a complete indifference to them, as though he were some vivisected animal deprived of the power of discrimination.

Now he had turned into Waverly Place, and was walking westward toward Washington Square.  At the corner he pulled himself up, saying half-aloud:  “The office—­I ought to be at the office.”  He drew out his watch and stared at it blankly.  What the devil had he taken it out for?  He had to go through a laborious process of readjustment to find out what it had to say....  Twelve o’clock....  Should he turn back to the office?  It seemed easier to cross the square, go up the steps of the old house and slip his key into the door....

The house was empty.  His mother, a few days previously, had departed with Mr. Dagonet for their usual two months on the Maine coast, where Ralph was to join them with his boy....  The blinds were all drawn down, and the freshness and silence of the marble-paved hall laid soothing hands on him....  He said to himself:  “I’ll jump into a cab presently, and go and lunch at the club—­” He laid down his hat and stick and climbed the carpetless stairs to his room.  When he entered it he had the shock of feeling himself in a strange place:  it did not seem like anything he had ever seen before.  Then, one by one, all the old stale usual things in it confronted him, and he longed with a sick intensity to be in a place that was really strange.