All day, since the late reluctant dawn, the rain had comedown in torrents. It streamed against Darrow's high-perchedwindows, reduced their vast prospect of roofs and chimneysto a black oily huddle, and filled the room with the drabtwilight of an underground aquarium.

　　The streams descended with the regularity of a third day'srain, when trimming and shuffling are over, and the weatherhas settled down to do its worst. There were no variationsof rhythm, no lyrical ups and downs: the grey linesstreaking the panes were as dense and uniform as a page ofunparagraphed narrative.

　　George Darrow had drawn his armchair to the fire. The time-table he had been studying lay on the floor, and he satstaring with dull acquiescence into the boundless blur ofrain, which affected him like a vast projection of his ownstate of mind. Then his eyes travelled slowly about theroom.

　　It was exactly ten days since his hurried unpacking hadstrewn it with the contents of his portmanteaux. Hisbrushes and razors were spread out on the blotched marble ofthe chest of drawers. A stack of newspapers had accumulatedon the centre table under the "electrolier", and half adozen paper novels lay on the mantelpiece among cigar-casesand toilet bottles; but these traces of his passage had madeno mark on the featureless dulness of the room, its look ofbeing the makeshift setting of innumerable transientcollocations. There was something sardonic, almostsinister, in its appearance of having deliberately "made up"for its anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs andbrowns, with a carpet and paper that nobody would remember,and chairs and tables as impersonal as railway porters.

　　Darrow picked up the time-table and tossed it on to thetable. Then he rose to his feet, lit a cigar and went tothe window. Through the rain he could just discover theface of a clock in a tall building beyond the railway roofs.

　　He pulled out his watch, compared the two time-pieces, andstarted the hands of his with such a rush that they flewpast the hour and he had to make them repeat the circuitmore deliberately. He felt a quite disproportionateirritation at the trifling blunder. When he had correctedit he went back to his chair and threw himself down, leaningback his head against his hands. Presently his cigar wentout, and he got up, hunted for the matches, lit it again andreturned to his seat.

　　The room was getting on his nerves. During the first fewdays, while the skies were clear, he had not noticed it, orhad felt for it only the contemptuous indifference of thetraveller toward a provisional shelter. But now that he wasleaving it, was looking at it for the last time, it seemedto have taken complete possession of his mind, to be soakingitself into him like an ugly indelible blot. Every detailpressed itself on his notice with the familiarity of anaccidental confidant: whichever way he turned, he felt thenudge of a transient intimacy...

　　The one fixed point in his immediate future was that hisleave was over and that he must be back at his post inLondon the next morning. Within twenty-four hours he wouldagain be in a daylight world of recognized activities,himself a busy, responsible, relatively necessary factor inthe big whirring social and official machine. That fixedobligation was the fact he could think of with the leastdiscomfort, yet for some unaccountable reason it was the oneon which he found it most difficult to fix his thoughts.

　　Whenever he did so, the room jerked him back into the circleof its insistent associations. It was extraordinary withwhat a microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all:

　　the grimy carpet and wallpaper, the black marble mantel-piece, the clock with a gilt allegory under a dusty bell,the high-bolstered brown-counterpaned bed, the framed cardof printed rules under the electric light switch, and thedoor of communication with the next room. He hated the doormost of all...

　　At the outset, he had felt no special sense ofresponsibility. He was satisfied that he had struck theright note, and convinced of his power of sustaining it.

　　The whole incident had s............