wives and children. Everything constantly shifted, changed, perished;
all, that was, but the unintelligible spurring need beyond any
accomplishment.

In him it was almost as though there were--or, perhaps, had been--two
distinct, opposed processes of thought, two different personalities, a
fact still admirably illustrated by his private interest in the doll,
in Cytherea. Much younger he had been fond of music, of opera and then
symphony concerts, and his university years had been devoted to a wide
indiscriminate reading: sitting until morning with college men of
poetic tendencies, he had discussed the intricacies of conduct in the
light of beauty rather than prudence. This followed him shyly into the
world, the offices of the Magnolia Iron Works; where, he had told
himself optimistically, he was but finding a temporary competence.
What, when he should be free to follow his inclination, he'd do, Lee
never particularized; it was in the clouds nebulous and bright, and
accompanied by music. His dream left him imperceptibly, its vagueness
killed partly by the superior reality of pig iron and ore and partly
because he never had anyone with whom to talk it over; he could find no
sympathy to keep it alive.

That it wasn't very robust was evident; and yet, throughout his youth,
it had been his main source of incentive. No one, in the Magnolia
works, knew the difference between the Glucks, Alma and Christopher,
nor read anything but the most current of magazines. At intervals Lee
had found a woman who responded to the inner side of him, and together
they swept into an aesthetic emotional debauch; but they came
inevitably, in the surrounding ugliness of thought and ascribed
motives, to humiliating and ugly ends; and he drifted with increasing
rapidity to his present financial and material sanity.