I stacked the many pages, scribbled a note to Harold, and phoned to his office that the manuscript would be ready for his messenger at the desk. A few merry hours and a little excitement for the profligate, dun days of my fellow citizens, God bless and pity them--a vicarious trip beyond the confines of mass production--a description of the flavor of a few of the trees they had cut down. Bill came for it and carried it to the lobby. Now, my clothes. My costume. Everything was finished with the possible exception of me. Rain fell all around the marquee--in a wet, funereal fringe. The doorman stood in the street beneath his great umbrella, whistling. Two old ladies waited impatiently, jostling each other and batting annoyedly at their pocketbooks. They seemed to expect the whistle to conjure up a yellow taxi from the fourth dimension and because it took Al five minutes to hail an empty, the elder of the two put back her dime in her purse and snapped it with the righteous authoritative sound of a Norn's shears. "Let's go to Gimbel's first," she said. But the other wanted to start in Lord and Taylor's. They whisked away debating this. And I went soon--through the leaden atmosphere, on the black and slippery pavement. The people were there in the office ahead of me. Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so. The nurse was there, too. It was where we had come in. Where we all do. Where we leave. I sat, batting the drops from my trouser cuffs, smelling the damp feathers of the anxious poultry. I found my magazine. At last "Mr. Wylie." It was still a different doctor--a plump little man wearing glasses which took the radiance of his floor lamps as a shield so I could not see his eyes. His neutral hair was cut as short and even as fur. "I'm glad to make your acquaintance," he said. "Have a cigarette. I've read your books." I took his cigarette. Inauspicious token. The condemned man smoked a hearty breakfast. "Not all of us physicians deserve such a keel-hauling." He laughed at the way I'd rubbed the nose of his trade in its sins and pomposities. This was to show me his nose was immaculate. "Sure." He lighted his own and smoked the way doctors often do--like schoolkids with Cubebs. "Personally, I think it's a shame a man with ability like yours for putting words together should get mixed up in this Jungian stuff." The place had been done by a decorator--a decorator who saw a surgeon's waiting room as something soothing in ivories and sepia and faint gold. And putting words together is just a trick, too; it doesn't involve knowledge or sense--just lucky knack. I cut a smile in my face for him. "Talk it over, sometime," I said. He smirked interest in himself. "I'm a sort of cross between a Freudian and a semanticist, Wylie. What do you think of semantics?" "The poets understood it before Korzybski." "Very good! Very! Still--"