He was aware of Mrs. Smythe’s gaze, half suspicious and half impressed, from behind the yellowed lace curtains of the front room, and tried to assume a swagger as he moved away down the street. Yet it was clear to him that his three weeks at Stotwell had been so much wasted time; twenty-one aimless mornings, stupefied afternoons, and desperate evenings, during which his thoughts had obstinately refused to be clarified. How often, in the tumultuous muddle of his last year at the University, he had congratulated himself on having found a way out of the familiar impasse; when the insistent question of where, after the few fleeting months were over, he was to find a living wage had intruded itself, he had shrugged it aside, promising himself that he would deal with that and all his other problems in a few weeks of quiet and solitude. ‘Sorry,’ he would say in answer to questions about his future, ‘but I’m not making major decisions just now. One thing at a time, you know. At the moment I’m working for an examination—and,’ he would add pompously, ‘trying to live like a normal human being at the same time. When all this comes to an end, I’ll turn my attention to the problem of earning a living, without trying to isolate it from all the other big problems.’ It had all been very comforting. He had even held a modest ceremony at his lodgings, at which, in the presence of a few friends, he had decided on the town to which he should retire for his all-important spell of concentration. Asking them to write down the names of a dozen or so towns on a sheet of paper, avoiding the big cities where lodgings might be more expensive, he had then, with a fine air of casualness, stuck a pin into the list at random. ‘I’m quite indifferent,’ he had said, loftily; ‘a country village or an industrial town—my gaze will be directed inwards.’ By a ludi­crous coincidence his first jab with the pin had landed on the name of the one town in England that was useless for his purpose, the town where he was born and bred and where his parents lived; it had been written down in all innocence by one of his guests. The second jab had landed on the extreme edge of the paper, and was voted inconclusive, but the third had unequivocally indicated Stotwell. Full of hope, he had scurried across country to this dingy huddle of streets and factories, only to spend his precious weeks in nail-biting indecision. Nothing had been settled, not even the obvious and simple question of a trade, certainly not the deeper and more personal problems which he had shelved for years on the promise of this tranquil interlude.