The tension could not last.  For a time he was able to laugh at himself, and he made pleasant pictures—­Charley Carpenter telling him a story at Drubel’s; Morton companionably smoking on the top deck; Lee Theresa flattering him during an evening walk.  Most of all he pictured the brown-eyed sweetheart he was going to meet somewhere, sometime.  He thought with sophomoric shame of his futile affair with the waitress, then forgot her as he seemed almost to touch the comforting hand of the brown-eyed girl.

“Friends, that’s what I want.  You bet!” That was the work he was going to do—­make acquaintances.  A girl who would understand him, with whom he could trot about, seeing department-store windows and moving-picture shows.

It was then, probably, hunched up in the dowdy chair of faded upholstery, that he created the two phrases which became his formula for happiness.  He desired “somebody to go home to evenings”; still more, “some one to work with and work for.”

It seemed to him that he had mapped out his whole life.  He sat back, satisfied, and caught the sound of emptiness in his room, emphasized by the stilly tick of his watch.

“Oh—­Morton—­” he cried.

He leaped up and raised the window.  It was raining, but through the slow splash came the night rattle of hostile London.  Staring down, he studied the desolate circle of light a street-lamp cast on the wet pavement.  A cat gray as dish-water, its fur worn off in spots, lean and horrible, sneaked through the circle of light like the spirit of unhappiness, like London’s sneer at solitary Americans in Russell Square rooms.

Mr. Wrenn gulped.  Through the light skipped a man and a girl, so little aware of him that they stopped, laughingly, wrestling for an umbrella, then disappeared, and the street was like a forgotten tomb.  A hansom swung by, the hoofbeats sharp and cheerless.  The rain dripped.  Nothing else.  Mr. Wrenn slammed down the window.

He smoothed the sides of his suit-case and reckoned the number of miles it had traveled with him.  He spun his watch about on the table, and listened to its rapid mocking speech, “Friends, friends; friends, friends.”

Sobbing, he began to undress, laying down each garment as though he were going to the scaffold.  When the room was dark the great shadowy forms of fear thronged unchecked about his narrow dingy bed.

Once during the night he woke.  Some sound was threatening him.  It was London, coming to get him and torture him.  The light in his room was dusty, mottled, gray, lifeless.  He saw his door, half ajar, and for some moments lay motionless, watching stark and bodiless heads thrust themselves through the opening and withdraw with sinister alertness till he sprang up and opened the door wide.

But he did not even stop to glance down the hall for the crowd of phantoms that had gathered there.  Some hidden manful scorn of weakness made him sneer aloud, “Don’t be a baby even if you are lonely.”