Carefully so as not to dampen the crease in his trousers he laid his hands upon his thighs and through the wide window looked down toward the street below. The heat of the day had dulled him. For many many days now he had become parched with dread at the prospect of sitting like this and waiting for the optometrist. But like a plant to the sun, he rose to occasions once the light of authority was directed upon him. Gargan had said to come here and he was here, and the horror that lay within him could not rise and take shape so long as he kept on doing as he was told. He waited, staring through the window and seeing blurs. Thoughts formed chains leading away and he followed, remembering the men who had bucked off for themselves only to flounder about, while he had stayed on with the company, underpaid but dignified, and had worked right through the depression, right through the war. Because he had toed the line, done his duty, carried off the ceaseless indignities that came from above. He was safe, would always be. Perhaps, when this whole monstrous war was over, he might even find a woman and get married. Perhaps his mother might be persuaded to go to her brother’s in Syracuse. Perhaps …

As he sat in the quiet room staring down at a street that was hazy to his eyes, a rare but persistent vision returned to him – the shape of a woman. She was large, almost fat, and she had no face that he could make out, but he knew she was congenial to him. She was an old inhabitant of his mind and seemed to arise before him most readily at times like this when duty pressed him. And her body in his sight now recalled, as it always did, the first time she had come to him. He was sitting in a trench near the border of France and he had been sitting there in water for three days. Colonel Taffrey came into the trench that night and said they were to go into attack when morning came, and then went away. It was during those few hours before the dawn that she formed herself for Mr Newman, her thighs and her hollows nearly touching his hand. And when the time came and he climbed the parapet he swore to keep his longing for her and all she meant to him, for it was the most beautiful desire he had known in his life. If he ever got home he would find a good job and work until he had a nice house, like the ones they advertised, and then he would have her, a woman with her form and her congeniality. But when he got home he sat with his mother in their parlor in Brooklyn, and she told him quietly and with the shades drawn that she was losing the motion of her legs …