hesitation he would do it. Still there was no blinking facts. Here was
the nemesis, not of ill living, but of good--namely, emptiness,
loneliness, homelessness, Old Age here at his elbow, Death waiting there
ahead.

"The routine has gone on too long," he said to himself bitterly. "I have
lost my pliability, lost my humanity. I am a machine now, not a man. To
the machine, work is life. Work over, life is over; and the machine is
just so much lumber--better broken up and sent to the rag and bottle
shop, where it may fetch the worth of its weight as scrap-iron."

He turned, came back to the open window again and stood there, rather
carefully avoiding the three reproachful eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-
room gaselier, and fixing his gaze on that sullen fierceness of sunset
still hanging in the extreme northwest.

"Unluckily there is no rag and bottle shop where superannuated bank
clerks of five-and-fifty have even the very modest market value of scrap-
iron!" he went on. "Of all kinds of uselessness, that of we godlike human
beings is the most utterly obvious when our working day is past. Mental
decay and bodily corruption as the ultimate. And, this side of it, a few
years of increasing degradation, a mere senseless killing of time until
the very unpleasing goal is reached--along with a growing selfishness,
and narrowness of outlook; along, possibly, with some development of
senile sensuality, the more detestable because it lacks the provocations
of hot blood. Oh! Dominic Iglesias, Dominic Iglesias, is that the ugly
road you are doomed to travel--a toothless greed for filling your belly
with fly-blown dainties off the refuse-heap?"

And through the open window, in sinister accompaniment to little Mr.