But he told himself that was not the way, so he went downstairs and
took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived in Newark he got off the train and took
another cab, directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania
tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the roadways and
had drifted deep in the open fields. Only here and there the
dead grass or dried weed stalks projected, singularly black,
above it. Once well into the country, Paul dismissed the
carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a
medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an
actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He
remembered every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless
old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat,
the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow
passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital
matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and
grouping these images. They made for him a part of the ugliness
of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on
his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth
as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a
little hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty
feet below him, he stopped and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he
noticed, their red glory all over. It occurred to him that all
the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must
have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one
splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the
winter outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it