Charter rubbed the steam from the bath-room window, shaded his eyes, and looked for the daylight which was not there. Stars still shone clear in the unwhitened distances. Why was he so eager for the dawn? It was the drunkard in him--always frightened and restless, even in sleep, _while buffets are closed_. This is so, even though a filled flask cools the fingers that grope under the pillow.... Any man who has ever walked the streets during the two great cycles of time between three and five in the morning, waiting for certain sinister doors to open, does not cease to shiver at the memory even in his finer years. It is not the discordant tyranny of nerves, nor the need of the body, pitiful and actual though it is, wherein the terror lies,--but living, walking with the consciousness that the devil is in power; that you are the debauched instrument of his lust, putting away the sweet fragrant dawn for a place of cuspidors, dormant flies, sticky woods, where bleared, saturated messes of human flesh sneak in, even as you, to lick their love and their life.... That you have waited for this moment for hours--oh, God!--while the fair new day comes winging over mountains and lakes, bringing, cleansed from inter-stellar spaces, the purity of lilies, new mysteries of love, the ruddy light of roses and heroic hopes for clean men--that you should hide from this adoring light in a dim place of brutes, a place covered with the psychic stains of lust; that you should run from clean gutters to drink this hell-seepage. He asked himself why he thirsted for light. If every door on his floor were a saloon, he would not have entered the nearest. And yet a summer dawn was due. Hours must have passed since midnight. He glanced into the medicine-case before turning off the lights in the bath-room. Alcohol was the base in many of the bottles; this thought incited fever in his brain.... He could hardly stand. A well-man would have been weakened by the processes of cleansing he had endured. The blackness, pressing against the outer window, became the form of his great trouble. "I wish the day would come," he said aloud. His voice frightened him. It was like a whimper from an insane ward. He hastened to escape from the place, now hateful.