Abruptly, and in that conscious and secret plot which men insist upon calling subconscious, he peered at the picture of a black man and a white man throwing a wilted rose back and forth to each other and catching it without a trace of emotion. The little, ridiculous rose lost a petal after each catch, but in spite of its smallness the number of petals seemed to be inexhaustible. At a distance the black and white man exactly resembled each other, but on approaching closer it could be seen that the black man held the face of an incredibly stolid ruffian, while the white man’s face was engraved with the patience of a cowed child. Not being acquainted with psychoanalysis--that blind exaggeration of sexual routines--Carl did not believe, after he returned to the touch of the park bench, that this picture had slyly veiled the direction of his physical desires. He knew that a fantastic whim had slipped from his mind and induced him to probe his choice between two equally drab kinds of labor, striving to make this choice endurable for a moment. He selected three advertisements, all of them asking for manual laborers, walked from the park, and boarded a street car. The first place that he visited was a box factory--a slate-colored crate of a building, bearing that flatly unexpectant tone that expresses the year-long mating of smoke and dirt. As he ascended the gloomy stairway an endless drone and clatter battled with his ears. It seemed a senseless blasphemy directed at nothing in particular--the complaint of a dull-witted, harnessed giant who was being driven on without knowing why. Carl entered a huge room disheveled with sawdust and shavings and cluttered with black belts and wheels. Men with swarthy, motionless faces and feverish arms leaned over the wheels and saws. As he stood near the doorway, feeling dwarfed and uncertain, a man came toward him. Sturdy and short, the man looked like a magnified and absent-minded gnome, too busy to realize that civilization had played an obscene trick on him by stealing his fairy disguise and substituting the colorless inanities of overalls and a black shirt. The large and heavily twisted features on his face were partially hidden by a brown stubble of beard, and like all men who work forever in factories, he had an ageless air in which youth, middle age and old age were pounded into one dull evasion. “What d’ya want?” he asked, the words jumbled to a bark. “I’m looking for work. Saw your ad in the paper.” He examined the region between Carl’s toes and cap, measuring the unimportance of flesh. “We want good strong men to load boxes and carry lumber,” he said. “You don’t look like a man for the job, bo. You’re dressed like a travelin’ salesman an’ we want men who ain’t afraid to get dirt on their clothes. Get me?”