One Sunday morning, Carl sat at home, lightly wandering through a newspaper. On the previous night he had met Petersen and had yielded to an invitation to accompany “two swell brunettes who don’t object to a gay time,” and the recollection of his violent, drunken contortions came to him like a weirdly teasing dream of no particular significance but leaving the temptation of nausea behind it. He had released a desecrating ghost of himself from the sneering recesses of his self-despair. Yes, you could burn away the sensual rubbish, with derisive gestures, but your emptiness and weariness always returned for their slow revenge. He sought to put his thoughts to sleep with the hasty versions of loves, catastrophes, and law-suits that winked maliciously at him from the newspaper. In the middle of one page he came upon a rectangle of gossip concerning a poetry magazine of whose existence he had never known, and darting from his insensitive trance he lingered greedily over the news. Through the efforts of an elderly poetess several society people had agreed to endow a small magazine that would be entirely devoted to verse, and the newspaper item was heralding the fact that one of these people had contributed a sonnet to a recent issue of the magazine. “Mr. Robert Endicott, the well-known clubman and member of fashionable sets, appears with a delicate contribution in this month’s issue of The Poetry Review, our aristocratic little magazine of the muse. This will be a surprise to those who know Mr. Endicott only in his role of business-man and society leader.” Carl strove to be properly impressed by the surprise, decorating it with the Order of the Nasty Chuckle. He felt that it might be consoling to receive a rejection slip from an upper-world magazine of this kind--a dab of caviar on the empty plate--and so he sent them three poems. The paper oblong came, but its blank side held the following note: “Dear Mr. Felman: Your work interests me. Won’t you drop into the office some time? Clara Messenger.” What men call triumph is a fanciful exaltation that may fall alike upon atoms and temples--a grandiose child of hope, whose mother is egoism and whose father is pain. Men, whose life is but a sensitive or oblivious second--a fleeting stampede within mist--seek the absurd consolation of believing that their work will become immortal, and this phantom lie has induced many a soldier to writhe upon some trivial battlefield and many a minor poet to fight with threats of the gutter. Carl Felman, obscure, gasping struggler, communing with the marks left by endless whips, felt foolishly thrilled at this first glimpse of personal attention from a magazine and became like a swain to whom a glove has been thrown from an enticingly high balcony. He stood peering up with a timid excitement.