"O Nan," he said between clenched teeth. For an instant he felt her acutely walking beside him, leaning on his arm, her cheek against his cheek. He trembled as he walked. His body was a funnel of blackness in which his life was sucked away, whirling like water out of a washbasin. He jerked himself to a stop. He was at a corner in front of a drugstore. At the top of the greenly lit window his eyes followed the letters of a Coca-Cola sign. That will be the first act, he was thinking, I shall tell Nan. I can't go now. I'm too tired now... And all at once a great wave of jollity bubbled up through him. Of course I'll go and tell Nan. To love Nan, to walk arm in arm with her, the ache of desiring all eased, to talk endlessly to her, touching her... Now I'll go home and go to bed. In the morning early I'll go to see her before she's up, arrive carrying the milk and the paper. His heart pounding with anticipation, he started walking fast again down a cross street. He had a feeling of suddenly scrambling on to a mountain top from which he could see endless valleys radiating into sunlight, full of gleam of roads and streams and beckoning woods, and swift shine of rails taut about the bulging hills. From now on he would burst through the stagnant film of dreams, his life would be a headlong adventure. Tomorrow Nan and real living. They'd go away from Boston, where they were caged by dead customs, where there were ghosts at every corner, constricting ghosts.

At Massachusetts Avenue the wind was like a razor in his face. The blundering yellow oblong of a car came towards him along the black straight track through the rutted snow. He ran, slipped and with a laugh landed on the step.

"Wait till the car stops," said the conductor mechanically. "Safety first."

Wenny dropped into the seat beside a lean redfaced man with floppy ears.

"Hullo, Wendell," the man said, "How's your museum work going?"

"It's gone. I'm chucking the whole shooting match."

"Why on earth?"

"I'm going abroad. I don't know what I'm going to do. I am going to do something. This isn't anything."

"But why drop out now? Why not wait for your M. A.? You haven't been fired, have you?"

Wenny laughed and laughed.