For three hours he writhed on that door-step, till he came to hate it; it was as much a prison as his room at the Zapps’ had been.  He hated the areaway grill, and a big brown spot on the pavement, and, as a truck-driver hates a motorman, so did he hate a pudgy woman across the street who peeped out from a second-story window and watched him with cynical interest.  He finally could endure no longer the world’s criticism, as expressed by the woman opposite.  He started as though he were going to go right now to some place he had been intending to go to all the time, and stalked away, ignoring the woman.

He caught a bus, then another, then walked a while.  Now that he was moving, he was agonizedly considering his problem:  What was Istra to him, really?  What could he be to her?  He was just a clerk.  She could never love him.  “And of course,” he explained to himself, “you hadn’t oughta love a person without you expected to marry them; you oughtn’t never even touch her hand.”  Yet he did want to touch hers.  He suddenly threw his chin back, high and firm, in defiance.  He didn’t care if he was wicked, he declared.  He wanted to shout to Istra across all the city:  Let us be great lovers!  Let us be mad!  Let us stride over the hilltops.  Though that was not at all the way he phrased it.

Then he bumped into a knot of people standing on the walk, and came down from the hilltops in one swoop.

A crowd was collecting before Rothsey Hall, which bore the sign: 

GLORY—­GLORY—­GLORY

SPECIAL SALVATION ARMY JUBILEE MEETING

EXPERIENCES OF ADJUTANT CRABBENTHWAITE IN AFRICA

He gaped at the sign.  A Salvationist in the crowd, trim and well set up, his red-ribboned Salvation Army cap at a jaunty angle, said, “Won’t you come in, brother?”

Mr. Wrenn meekly followed into the hall.  Bill Wrenn was nowhere in sight.

Now it chanced that Adjutant Crabbenthwaite told much of Houssas and the N’Gombi, of saraweks and week-long treks, but Mr. Wrenn’s imagination was not for a second drawn to Africa, nor did he even glance at the sun-bonneted Salvationist women packed in the hall.  He was going over and over the Adjutant’s denunciations of the Englishmen and Englishwomen who flirt on the mail-boats.

Suppose it had been himself and his madness over Istra—­at the moment he quite called it madness—­that the Adjutant had denounced!

A Salvationist near by was staring at him most accusingly....

He walked away from the jubilee reflectively.  He ate his dinner with a grave courtesy toward the food and the waiter.  He was positively courtly to his fork.  For he was just reformed.  He was going to “steer clear” of mad artist women—­of all but nice good girls whom you could marry.  He remembered the Adjutant’s thundered words: