He got out at his station and climbed to the street, seeing only the mirror. Without noticing Mr Finkelstein, who was sitting in front of his candy store taking the warm night air, he crossed over to his side of the street and turned up the path that bisected his tiny front lawn. The screen door was unlocked and the door was open. Forgetting to take off his hat he passed his mother where she sat by the radio in the living room, and went upstairs rapidly, for he knew these stairs. He called good evening down to her as he entered the bathroom and turned on the light. He set his hat upon the flat rim of the bathtub and took out the glasses. The stems opened stiffly in his hands and he was careful not to force them. He put the glasses on and looked into the mirror. The mercurial blur swirled before his eyes again, grained by the colors of his tie. He stared into this mass of silver. He blinked his eyes and looked again. On the right side he began to see the frame of the mirror. It became very sharp. Now the left side cleared. The whole frame of the mirror became astonishingly clear, so much so that he forgot his purpose and looked around at the bathroom. It suddenly seemed as though he had let out a breath which he had been holding for many years. The bristles of his toothbrush … how definite they were! The tile on the floor, the weave of the towels … And then he remembered …

A long time he stood staring at himself, at his forehead, his chin, his nose. It took many moments of detailed inspection of his parts before he could see himself whole. And he felt as though rising off the floor. The beating of his heart caused his head to nod slightly in rhythm. Saliva filled a little pool in his throat and he coughed. In the mirror in his bathroom, the bathroom he had used for nearly seven years, he was looking at what might very properly be called the face of a Jew. A Jew, in effect, had gotten into his bathroom. The glasses did just what he had feared they would do to his face, but this was worse because this was real. It was shockingly worse than at the optometrist’s three weeks ago when he had tried on the frames alone. Then they seemed to make him more like the Hindenburg Jew type, for he did have flat vertical cheeks and a squarish head and very fair skin, and – most telling – suggestions of bags under his eyes, the stern Hindenburg pouches. And that would have been bad but not impossible, not like this. Now with the lenses magnifying his eyeballs, the bags, being colorless, lost prominence and the eyes fairly popped, glared. The frames seemed to draw his flat, shiny-haired skull lower and set off his nose, so that where it had once appeared a trifle sharp it now beaked forth from the nosepiece. He took the glasses off and slowly put them on again to observe the distortion. He tried his smile. It was the smile of one who is forced to pose before a camera, but he held it and it was no longer his smile. Under such bulbous eyes it was a grin, and his teeth which had always been irregular now seemed to insult the smile and warped it into a cunning, insincere mockery of a smile, an expression whose attempt at simulating joy was belied, in his opinion, by the Semitic prominence of his nose, the bulging set of his eyes, the listening posture of his ears. His face was drawn forward, he fancied, like the face of a fish.