phones and its printing machines hurling with a whir and clatter the news of the world into the air, and above it brooding, like an immense brain—the God of its restless activity—the Dome of St. Paul's.
Peter climbed down from his omnibus because he saw on his right a Public Reading Room. Here in tattered and anxious company, he studied the papers and took down addresses in a note book. He was frightened for an instant by the feet that shuffled up and down the floor from paper to paper. There was something most hopeless in the sound of that shuffle.
“'Ave yer a cigarette on yer, Mister, that yer wouldn't mind—”
He turned round and at once, like blows, two fierce gaunt eyes struck him in the face. Two eyes staring from some dirty brown pieces of cloth on end, it seemed, by reason of their own pathetic striving for notice, rather than because of any life inside them.
Peter murmured something and hurried away. Supposing that editors . . . but no, this was not the proper beginning of a successful day. But the place, down steps under the earth, with its miserable shallows was not pleasant to remember.
His first visit was to the office of The Morning World. He remembered his remark to Stephen about self-assertion, but his heart sank as he entered the large high room with its railed counter running round the centre of it—a barrier cold, impassable. Already several people were sitting on chairs that were ranged along the wall.
Peter went up boldly to the counter and a very thin young man with a stone hatchet instead of a face and his hair very wonderfully parted in the middle—so accurately parted that Peter could think of nothing else—watched him coldly over the barrier.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
“I want to see the Editor.”
“Have you an appointment?”
“No.”
“Oh, I'm afraid that it would be impossible without an appointment.”
“Is there any one whom I could see?”
