Tom was at a pass where all these things were chaos. The clear facts of living were straws in a heaving sea: straws he reached for. He went brightly about his profession. It prospered. But it became more and more a thing to hide from David. And all such things were more and more to be hidden from himself. Marcia was engaged. He feared her marriage which he had manoeuvered, vaguely, as the time of a demand he could not face. Also he looked forward to her marriage: the senses of him: his blood and his wits as well. Marcia’s marriage must be a function of both. He tried, close to David, to blot out his conflicts. He tried to realize that it was David himself who brought about the conflicts: and to pursue the rational conclusion that it was David who must be blotted out. His reasonings had the way of playing him into some dark dilemma. The forces driving him toward the constant agitation of his wits seemed all too clearly irrational and heart-sent. He could not isolate the verbs of his reason. If he did, he found them without subject, object--dead waifs of sound flecking a hollow mind. His reaching for the true drive within him left him a streak in imponderable Space, as if he had grasped a Comet. It was better to be confined to straws. The schemings pertinent to Marcia, straws: the intricate work downtown, straws also: the being with friends, the satisfaction of his senses, straws again. The effect upon his mind--this passionate bestowal upon work he could not respect, upon pleasure he could not enjoy--was a slow desiccation. He was dry, cynical, erethic. He needed to rouse himself to heights of activation: his work called for no less. And the impulse rousing him was ever one he was cold to. A strain on his nerves. As in a man making himself drunk with drink he forces himself to swallow. Needfully, since this vast disharmony gained on his life and since each part of it warred against the others, Tom came to bestow upon its various factors the quality of respite and escape. He needed a makeshift harmony in order to live. One instant of admitted anarchy in our minds means madness: in our bodies death. Since discord was there, it must be balanced with other discord. One group of his thoughts swelled, sagged out of place: he propped it into a semblance of poise with another hypertrophy. So discord propagates itself. Life went on.