Still he did not start at once for Ahmedabad. He locked himself in Number Five through the days and walked the streets of Bombay at night, walked like a man in a strait-jacket. He wasn’t conscious of this at first, until he began to feel an ache from the tension of his neck and shoulder muscles and tightened elbows. When he forced himself to relax, however, the torture of his thoughts was accentuated. He had been holding himself rigidly to help fend off the destroying rush of mental images. He walked himself into one sweat after another for the nights were hot and humid. The point of all his fighting was to keep Pidge Musser out of mind. Of course, he could not succeed. She came in by every door. She came in softly, she came in scornfully, she came in singing, scolding. Mostly she came in saying, “Why, don’t you see, Dicky, I am nearer and clearer than ever?” Then it was as if an isolated bit of shrapnel would explode in his brain. His whole fabric of world politics was demolished. It looked to him like a tapestry that has been hooked up out of a sewer--all that careful weaving and balanced pigmentation! Before the day of the letter he had prided himself that his building in the past two years was good and strong. Now he faced the pitiful discovery that every block of his building had been placed upon this platform: That even if he couldn’t have her, no one else could. This smelled to him now. Forever after, it smelled to him like the sewage lanes of old Bombay. Dicky had a good body. After two weeks his physical vitality began to steal back. The love was gone, but out of the debris of Subramini’s Punjabi Fireplace, the face of Miss Claes came up faintly smiling again. Another letter came from her, which he read in dismal irony several times on the day before he took the train for Ahmedabad--the last day in Number Five, with its wall paper of raspberry crush. He couldn’t make sense out of the letter. She seemed to love Pidge, even to respect her. Miss Claes wrote, “It gives me quiet joy to know that Nagar is near you. It will be good for him and good for you. A great dearness for you both goes from this house, as you sit and walk together.” Miss Claes also repeated in her letter that “love never faileth”----