He stopped. It was less that he was saying this, than that he had come so far without a nudge from within. They had passed the big front doors, and met the wind of the street before he realised how deep the mannerism of the establishment had prevailed upon him. The process had passed almost into fulfilment before the truth within him had stirred from its sleep.... A very grey day. All through that luncheon he had found himself at angles from his companion, in strategic hollows, never in the level open. It wasn’t that he was different from usual, but that he was watching himself more shrewdly. His inner coherence was repeatedly broken, though the outer effects were not. He had never perceived before with such clarity that a man cannot be square and friendly to another man, when his mind and critical faculties are busy appraising him, while his eyes and lips approved and assuaged. Bellair that day realised his moral derangement--that he must be ripped open and his displaced organs corrected once for all, if anything decent was to come from him ever again.... He was still thinking in mid-afternoon, in the very trance of these thoughts, when he happened to look into Mr. Sproxley’s face. It seemed to him that there was a movement of most pitiful activities back of the red and black of Mr. Sproxley’s eyes. There was much mental roving on Bellair’s part that week; moments in which the Monday morning abandon returned, and his self-amazement of the Tuesday luncheon, upon discovering how deeply his thoughts were imbedded in the prevailing lie. New York and the salary clutched him hard at intervals; so that he saw something of what was meant to give it up; also he saw that dreams are dreams.... Thousands of other young men would be glad to do his work, even his dirty work.