clerk, the arrival and departure of business associates and clients.
Above the hum of subdued office conversation the click of typewriting
machines and the incessant buzzing of the desk telephones, he was
conscious of hearing the same question repeated with monotonous
fidelity:

"Hello! What's new with you?"

And as surely, either through his own lips or the lips of another, the
identical reply always came:

"Not a thing in the world!"

At half past eleven he stopped deliberately and stood for a moment,
nervously fingering his tie. He was thinking about the course of
action that he had decided upon in that long, unusual vigil of the
night before. His uncertainty lasted until the remembrance of his
wife's scornful question swept over him:

"Why aren't you doing something?... Everybody else is!"

But it was the answer he had made that committed him irrevocably to
his future course:

"Perhaps I am. You don't know everything."

He had felt a sense of fatality bound up in these words of defiant
pretense, once they had escaped him...a fatality which the blazing
contempt of his wife's retort had emphasized. Even now his cheeks
burned with the memory of that unleashed insult: