Those three months had left their trace on him. He loathed his life; he had no companions, no hope; he was absorbed in the effort to endure his suffering. His indolence made his daily labor hateful as the treadmill. He was fastidious, and his surroundings sickened him. His food disgusted him, and so did the close atmosphere of the office. But he had chosen his fate, and he had no heart to try to escape from it, since it gave him the means of keeping body and soul together. Day after day, as that hot September wore away, he looked out on a dreary range of roofs and chimney-pots. He learned to know and hate every broken tile. From his bedroom he looked into a narrow back yard, deep like a well, at the bottom of which children swarmed, uncleanly and unwholesome, and women gossiped and wrangled as they hung out dingy rags to dry. The fierce sun shone on it all, and on Percival as he leant at his window surveying it with disgust, yet something of fascination too. "I fancied the sun wouldn't seem so bright in holes like this," he mused. "I thought everything would be dull and dim. Instead of which, he glares into every cranny and corner, as if he were pointing at all the filth and squalid misery, and makes it ten times more abominable." Nor did the slanting rays light up anything pleasant and fresh in the bedroom itself. It was shabby and small, with coarsely-papered walls and a discolored ceiling. Percival remarked that his window had a very wide sill. He never found out the reason, unless it were intended that he should take the air by sitting on it and dangling his legs over the foulest of water-butts. But when night came the broad sill was the favorite battlefield for all the cats in the neighborhood. It might have been pointed out as readily as they point you out the place where the students fight at Heidelberg.