Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all.
This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this
was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of
his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a
place where fagged-looking businessmen got on the early car; mere
rivets in a machine they seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with
combings of children's hair always hanging to their coats, and
the smell of cooking in their clothes. Cordelia Street--Ah, that
belonged to another time and country; had he not always been
thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as
he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering
textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one
between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no
especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all
he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the
pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for.
Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in his lodge at the
Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings,
of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show
himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his
surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had
only to wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his
attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for
anyone to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting room to go
to bed that night, and sat long watching the raging storm from
his turret window. When he went to sleep it was with the lights