“I mean,” Felix went on hastily, “I’ve got in a rut. I go through my work mechanically. I don’t use my brains. I’m dull. And it’s getting worse. I simply can’t take any interest in my work.” “You mean you want to be fired?” Hastings asked severely. It was absurd. In fact, it was preposterous. This was not the way to do it at all. But it was too late now. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Well, then, you are.” Hastings looked coldly at the ungrateful and rather sheepish-looking youth standing before him. “Have you got another job?” he asked suspiciously. “No—I’m going to Chicago to look for one.” As soon as he said that, he wished he hadn’t. It committed him to going. He couldn’t back out now. He had to go. “And I haven’t any money except my pay-check for this week.” He hadn’t thought of that before. How could he go without money? “Will you lend me fifty dollars?” It had slipped out without his intending it. Felix blushed. He was certainly behaving like a fool. After proving himself to Hastings an utter incompetent, to ask him for money.... He would go on a freight train.... “Fifty—what are you talking about? Chicago!” Hastings was embarrassed, too. “Why—why—yes, I can lend you some money, if you really want it.... Chicago—I don’t know but what you’re right, after all.... When are you going?” Felix was trying to think now before he spoke. He just managed to check himself on the point of saying, “Tonight!” All this was happening too swiftly. He needed time to consider everything, to make his plans. A month would be none too much. “Next m—Monday,” he said. 4 When Felix left the office he went home by a round-about way which took him up through one of the quiet residential streets of the town. He turned a corner, and walked slowly down past a row of cheerful little houses set back within well-kept lawns. There was nothing magnificent or showy about these houses—they did not betoken any vast prosperity or leisure, but only a moderate comfort and security. They might perhaps suggest a certain middle-class smugness; but even that was no reason why Felix should have looked at them from under his slouching hat-brim with such a grimace of hostility. As he neared a particular one of these houses, he walked faster and bent his head, casting a furtive glance at its windows. But there was no one to be seen at those windows, and so Felix looked again and slowed his step a little. In front of the house he paused momentarily and looked at it with an apparently casual glance. He had gone past that house, in this manner, a dozen times in the past year, savoring painfully each time the hard, unmistakable, disciplinary fact that there, contentedly under that roof, the wife of its owner, lived Joyce—his Joyce of only a year ago. He had come, now, to read that lesson in realism for the last time.