Mr. Farley stepped into the street and closed the front door stealthily behind him. Too agitated to endure breakfast with his family, he remembered the cheap restaurant around the corner, a place lined with grotesque mirrors and white and narrow like the corridor of a ship.
When he went in he found the floor, covered with brick-colored linoleum, smeared and darkened with grease, and the cloth on the table where he seated himself was stained with pink-brown splashes of wine. The waiter came up, a soft heavy man whose feet pressed the floor as soundlessly as those of a panther. Mr. Farley took the list of dishes from the waiter's hand, fat like the hand of a corpse. The waiter's sad little eyes were set in a broad white face stubbled with bluish beard. When he moved away he was like a ghost. His large hips swayed, woman-wise. His soiled apron floated over a generous belly as profound as sleep.
Flies buzzed against the walls and fell back upon the half-washed table coverings and the cracked cruets opaque from many fillings.
Mr. Farley stirred gray crystals of sugar into the gold-edged blackness of his coffee, then clouded it with the pale blue-auraed milk that brimmed the squat white pitcher.
He tried to think things out, but he had nurtured his self-esteem on the verity of abnegation and it was hard for him to accept as a blessing the thing which it had given him so much comfort to do without.
Safe in the conviction that there would be no end to his sacrifice, he had allowed full abandon to his mystical and repressed nature. Helen Wilson had become glorified and beyond attainment. He was in terror of seeing her too clearly. When her neat figure, a little stout, emerged distinctly from the chaos of his reflections, he deliberately let down a curtain of confusion across the mirror of his consciousness.
After dinner Mr. Farley went into the living-room and seated himself in an armchair. He had scarcely exchanged a word with any one during the meal. He bent his head in his hands. The light from the shaded lamp glistened obliquely along the thin parting of his hair and his baldish scalp.
Mrs. Farley made pretexts to come near him. In the afternoon she had been mending a nightdress of May's and left it on top of the magazine rack, and now she came to get it.
She was a long time putting her sewing things together. Mr. Farley saw her, but he did not stir.