However, in spite of these activities and all the bustle and stir of fresh beginnings, Joe, that sunny morning, was suffering a sharp reaction.  In the presence of Nathan Slate and Billy he was pretending to work, but his brain was as dry as a soda-cracker.  It was that natural revulsion of the idealist following the first glow.  Here he was, up against a reality, and yet with no definite plan, not even a name for his paper, and he had not even begun to penetrate the life about him.  The throbbing moment had arrived when he must set his theories into motion, drive them out into the lives of the people, and get reactions.  But how?  In what way?  His brain refused to think, and he felt nothing save a misery and poverty of the spirit that were unendurable.

It seemed to him suddenly as if he had hastily embarked on a search for the fountain of eternal youth—­a voyage that followed mirages, and was hollow and illusory.  Beginnings, after the first flush, always have this quality of fake, and Joe was standing in the shadow-land between two lives.  The old life was receding in the past; the new life had not yet appeared.  Without training, without experience, without definite knowledge of the need to be met, with only a strong desire and a mixed ideal, and almost without his own volition, he found himself now sitting at a desk in West Tenth Street, with two employees, and nothing to do.  How out of this emptiness was he to create something vital?

This naturally brought a pang he might have anticipated.  He had a sudden powerful hankering for the old life.  That at least was man-size—­his job had been man’s work.  He looked back at those fruitful laborious days, with their rich interest and absorbing details, their human companionships, and had an almost irrepressible desire to rush out, take the elevated train, go down East Eighty-first Street, ascend the elevator, ring the bell, and enter his dominion of trembling, thundering presses.  He could smell the old smells, he could see the presses and the men, he could hear the noise.  That was where he belonged.  Voluntarily he had exiled himself from happiness and use.  He wanted to go back—­wanted it hard, almost groaned with homesickness.

Such struggles are death throes or birth throes.  They are as real as two men wrestling.  Joe could sit still no longer, could mask no longer the combat within him.  So he rose hastily and went out and wandered about the shabby, unfriendly neighborhood.  He had a mad desire, almost realized, to take the car straight to Eighty-first Street, and only the thought of Marty Briggs in actual possession held him back.  Finally he went back and took lunch, and again tried the vain task of pretending to work.

It was three o’clock when he surrendered.  He strode in to his mother.

“Mother,” he said, “isn’t there something we can do together?”

“In what way?”

“Any way.  I’ve been idling all day and I’m half dead.”  He laughed strangely.  “I believe I’m getting nerves, mother.”