We exchanged a long look, at the end of which I told him, commiseratingly trying to get his mind off his anxiety, that which I had intended using as a cudgel to bruise him. “I got the chance to see it,” I flung myself into it; “and now I’d give much if I hadn’t. We crowded into a slit of a place, and peeked through a large pane of glass let into the wall.” He asked patiently in what wall the pane of glass was. “Don’t make it sound like Alice and the looking-glass, for I don’t feel whimsical.” I acknowledged to a corresponding lack of whimsy. “It was the trying-out of applicants for the job of radio announcer. We looked through the pane of glass as they admitted them one by one, like those hogs that go sliding down a chute at a slaughter house. Only the hogs don’t realize. And I assure you, Nicholas, that those poor wretches took every conceivable test of their courage. I don’t doubt but that they were hungry. The people on the street corners, selling apples, have made us all hunger-conscious.” I attacked my cocktail with thirst engendered by the hunger-consciousness. “You have the rapt look of the literary sleep-walker,” he stated. He had seen the look on various faces, and I judged by his accent that he did not like it. He glanced at his watch, and frowned. “Listen, Nicholas?” I urged. “Do listen? Behind the pane of glass we were like fish in an aquarium. You know how fish goggle out at humanity filing past their tank? We goggled.” The candidates for the one vacant job were creatures outside the world of the fish in the tank. The fish saw them, through the pane of glass, and heard not a word from them. The voices booming at intervals through the loud speaker above the control board beside us might have come from another dimension. Young men, middle-aged men, blustering men and uncertain men, strode past the pane of glass to their salvation or their doom. It had been a motley lot, I reported to Nicholas. There had been a clergyman, an old man. He interrupted: “Are you trying to drag me in spirit to the pane of glass?” “It wouldn’t hurt you,” I retorted. I wondered what detained Eva. Looking at the heaps of apples spotting the streets with red, he might feel that all was well and that Christmas was hot on the heels of a town gone mad with apprehension. He was uneasy, but his uneasiness was on account of Eva’s delay in getting home for the security of the night. Again he looked at his watch. “Dinah, I must interrupt to say----” But I rushed along. “Would you believe the cruelty of it? They gave them, as the ‘humorous test,’ that ghastly thing about the man worth while is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong! Are you listening to what I’m telling you?” He listened. But he listened for the sound of a key in the lock.