The Ivory God

At six o'clock Thurston put down his pen, pushed his chair back from the
table at which he had been writing, and rose to his feet with a series
of gestures indicative of mental and physical fatigue. He glanced at the
few sheets of manuscript which represented the result of a long day's
labour, and he frowned, as if in anger or distaste.

He had written, or tried to write, from ten o'clock until one, and again
from two until six; and his entire product after seven hours' work was
comparatively infinitesimal. He had felt no enthusiasm; he had been
unable to concentrate his thoughts; the whole thing had been distasteful
to him. As he glanced around him he asked himself for the thousandth
time whether the game was worth the candle.

More from force of habit than from genuine desire to do it, Thurston
proceeded to make some sort of toilet for the evening. He shaved and
washed carefully; he put on a clean linen shirt and a dark lounge suit;
he was unduly particular about the fold of his tie; in several small
ways he showed that he had a gentlemanlike love of cleanliness and
orderly habits.

He did everything very slowly. It would have been evident to anyone who
might have had an opportunity of watching him that he had no engagement
to keep. In point of fact, he had few friends with whom he could have
kept any engagement. He was, as he now never cared to remind himself,
one of the very loneliest men living. For a while he had reminded
himself of this pertinent truth somewhat often; then he wearied of the
thought, and put it from him. The fact of the loneliness, however,
remained.

Thurston lived in two rooms at the top of a house which stood in a quiet
street near the British Museum--a street of an aspect so grey and
pathetic that you wondered at first sight of it whether laughter or
children's voices were ever heard there. The two rooms opened one into
the other by means of a folding door. Thurston had furnished them
himself when he first came to town.