Except for the dull roar that came up and the clang of an occasional footstep along the hallways, it was so still and pleasant that the need to shoot himself seemed for the minute less insistent. It would have to be done sooner or later, but when it comes to suicide, even a few minutes’ respite is something. He could have done the thing right there and then by the window, where the few people within hearing would have run to him at sound of the shot. If the shot didn’t kill him, they would keep him from firing another. Publicity, distasteful in itself, might lead to ineffectuality. He must find a lavatory, and so began walking up and down the corridors, looking at doors discreetly placed in corners. When he came to his objective, it was locked. Again it was reprieve. The same door would be on other floors, but he was not ready for the moment to forsake his shelter. It was true that at any minute Flynn and Jackman might emerge from the lift, but there were nearly thirty chances that if they had followed him so closely they would not select this landing. Even more were the chances that they had not seen him slip into the building at all. Fevered and thirsty, he stooped to drink at the fountain crowning the head of a little bronze woman with a pair of dolphins on her shoulders. She seemed to be of Maya type, and a uniformed guardian had once told him that a great modern sculptor had molded her. With a difference in dolphins, she was repeated on every floor, forever diademed in water. Teddy’s mind had so far suspended operation as to his immediate plight that he went back to the morning, seven or eight months previously, when an errand from Mr. Brunt had brought him into the great ground-floor atrium, revealing the Basilica Julia or the Basilica Emilia of _Ancient Rome Restored_ right there in lower Broadway. Simplicity, immensity, the awesome beauty of mere form! The wide spaces, the mighty columns, the tempered white light of majestic Roman windows! The absence of striving for effect! The peace, the restfulness, the cheerfulness, when striving for effect are abandoned, dwarfing the magnitude of crowds and reducing their ebbings and flowing to mere vanity! Like Jennie with her emotions, like Pansy with her intuitions, Teddy had no words for these impressions; but the Scarborough tradition, nursed on _Ancient Rome Restored_, vibrated to their music. "And here I am, trapped like a rat in a hole!"