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never questioned her on the subject. Her oversight, her criminal negligence, might have been explained by her age. She may have felt herself too old to begin something new such as paying taxes or she may have felt that she would die before she was apprehended. Now and then the thought of her dereliction would waveringly cross her mind and she would suffer a fleeting pang of guilt, but, as she saw it, one of the privileges of age was a high degree of irresponsibility. In any case, she had never paid a tax and thus, one evening, a man named Norman Johnson got off the same train that had brought Coverly to St. Botolphs the night he saw his father’s ghost.
    Mr. Jowett guessed from his clothing that he was a salesman and directed him to the Viaduct House. Mabel Moulton, who had been running the hotel since her father’s stroke, led him up the stairs to a room on the second floor back. “It isn’t much,” she explained, “but it’s all we have.” She left him alone to amplify her observation. The single window looked out across the river to the table-silver factory. In the corner there was a pitcher and a basin for washing. He saw a chamber pot under the bed. These primitive arrangements disturbed him. Imagine using a chamber pot at a time when men freely explored space! But did astronauts use chamber pots? Motormen’s helpers? What did they use? He dropped this subject to sniff the air of the room but the Viaduct House was a very old hotel and forgiveness was all you could bring to its odors. He hung both the suit he wore and the one in his bag in the closet. The collection of tin coat-racks there chimed the half-hour when he touched them. This ghostly music startled him and then the stillness of the place rushed in. There were footsteps in the room overhead. A man’s? A woman’s? The heels were hard but the step was heavy and he guessed they belonged to a man. But what was he doing? First the stranger walked from the window to the closet. Then he walked from the closet to the bed. Then he walked from the bed to the washstand and then from the washstand back to the window. His step was brisk, quick and urgent, but his comings and goings were senseless. Was he packing, was he dressing, was he shaving or was he, as Johnson knew from his own experience, simply moving aimlessly around an empty place, wondering what it was that he had forgotten?
    Johnson, wearing a shirt and underpants, sat on the edge of the bed. (His underpants were printed with poker hands and dice.) He opened a bottle of sherry and drank a glass. In the heterogeneous and resurgent stream of faces that surrounds us there are those that seem to be the coins of a particular realm, that seem to have a sameness of feature and value. One would have seen Johnson before; one would see him again. He had the kind of long face to which the word “maturity” could not in any sense be applied. Time had been a series of unsuspected losses and rude blows, but in half-lights and cross-lights this emotional scar tissue was unseen and the face seemed earnest, simple and inscrutable. Some of us go around the world three times, divorce, remarry, divorce again, part with our children, make and waste a fortune, and coming back to our beginnings we find the same faces at the same windows, buy our cigarettes and newspapers from the same old man, say good morning to the same elevator operator, good night to the same desk clerk, to all those who seem, as Johnson did, driven into life by misfortune like the nails into a floor.
    He was a traveler, familiar with the miseries of loneliness, with the violence of its sexuality, with its half-conscious imagery of highways and thruways like the projections of a bewildered spirit; with that forlorn and venereal limbo that must have flowed over the world before the invention of Venus, unknown to good and evil, ruled by pain. His father had died when he was a boy and he had been raised by his mother and her sister, a schoolteacher and a