him to the street; and in this passage across the shining floor on his way to the entrance hall, where he meant to take the elevator and go to his own room, he touched the bottom of his misery.
But, having touched bottom, there was only one direction in which he could move; and as the ancient salvation of souls at the bottom is the fact that motion is the one perpetual necessity of all things, then upward he must go, willy-nilly. In that happy direction, therefore, he was going, though he had no hope or thought of it when he walked out into the hallway with the Toreador prancing so hatefully behind him.
In truth, the gods of comedy who had ridden the storm out of the too frolicsome northeastern seas and had espied him, happy, self-content, and newly prosperous, on that noble ship, the "Duumvir", took now a surfeit of him. They had pursued him furiously, allowing him only such moments of peaceful fatuousness between their harryings as should make his anguishes the more pungent and their mirth the keener; but, having had their fill of him at last, when even they could drive his spirit no lower than its lowest, they gave him over to mercy and departed from him for this while with the same abruptness of
