"Parr, what's wrong? Listen, Parr, are you all right down there?"
Suddenly he relaxed. "Nothing. Nothing's wrong."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," he said. "I'm just a little nervous."
He ordered the driver to stop. The building was columned, red brick, decayed. The sidewalk before it was grimy, littered, cracked, chipped. Listlessly, people shuffled down the street, flecks from the vortex of humanity farther uptown drifting in the backwater of the city. Faded overalls, jeans, thin unpressed cheap suits, frayed shirts and crumpled soggy collars. Faces—lean, hollow, blotched; eyes that were harried, red, tired. The women, still trying to retain the snap of movement, were like wind-up toys, almost run down.
Parr grunted at the smells of the area, and straightening up to pay the driver, noticed distastefully the slack faces, defeated eyes and shuffling steps.
Then he knew: here, pressing in from all sides was reassurance. He watched a haggered face, felt pity, shook off the emotion as unworthy but still felt it. He could understand the haggered face. But distaste returned again, for he was superior to the face. He blocked off his mind, refusing to consider the natives any longer....
He took a room inside the dingy, wasted building. He hung his extra suit in the closet. The wall was greyish with cracking plaster and water stains, half hidden by the dim light; the rug underfoot was threadbare and stale. On the dresser, a Gideon Bible, nearly new.
The sheets, he discovered upon turning back the bed, were dingy and yellowish. The mattress sagged in the middle and the metal bedstead was chipped and dented.