The office was a haphazard, a languorous, loose beast functioning dully through the inertia of its past and the prod of its future. Clusters of girls formed like flies on a kitchen table. They chatted and laughed and wiped the clotted powder from their cheeks. They took long hours for lunch, buying cakes and cream-puffs and olives from the store and eating in the office. The boys hovered about like greedy dogs, barking and sniffing and showing a tendency to rear on their hind legs. The girls, loving the sense of their desire, kept them unsated. Most of the occupants of the inner offices were absent. On the other floors, above, below, the rumble of the packers and the crash of boxes made a dusty murmur. David had seen these infernos of industry, caught the acerb flavor of wet tobacco and sweat and heat, observed men moving in the mist of their hands and women serried at filthy tables, with haggard arms that were forever plying and hot eyes that were still. He preferred his purgatory. He hated the hour of lunch when he must step down into the flaming stream of the canyon and be part of it, hunting his food. He was glad when the hour of closing came like a silent charm, stilled the drone of the work. No clock was needed to announce this hour. It went over the cluttered room like an invisible hand: its tenuous sweet fingers touched every one and everything. The girls at the writing machines clicked more slowly, their eyes wandered more and more, their hands brushed back their hair with a new hope.... A last spurt puckered their brows and their lips: then the power died. The boys at the tall ledger tables twisted legs about their chairs and stopped sharpening pencils. They whistled sudden snatches of a tune. Wide ranges of conversation sprang up. Talk wreathed forth until girls in the new silence of their machines addressed each other clear across the room: the men in the ledger alcoves laughed at jokes given forth from the front windows.... Sudden, like the last spin of a top, a tremor ran through the office, work toppled dead on its side. Girls were in hats: cigarettes sprouted on the lips of the boys. Overhead in the sudden noise of stillness, the new mood of the machines. Life was out of the window. In groups of two and three the girls were sucked away to it: the boys followed, with noses forward and dragging limbs. The streets were cauldrons that had overflowed. The sluices of pent life emptied upon them. Work had banked these fires: routine had stifled them to smoke. Now, the coals were strewn low and long. A draft of release whipped down the channeling gutters. There was flame. The houses brooded like disused ovens, storing their heat and their rust.