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lush green of meadows, or in a deep forest glade, he would let fate decree to which of the two he should offer himself. For the time being, though, he had decided to submerge fighting against the existing system and its bourgeois apologists. Politics was his first love; through politics the world would be created anew, giving our shattered humanity the wholeness of a star.

When Anna disappeared, Pierre was twenty-three years old. For the first time since childhood he felt as though

these intimate elements of his life, and dedicate himself to something rare and precious had slipped from his grasp. The shop seemed empty to him. The squabbling of the women got on his nerves. Lucien's "affairs" shocked him with their cynicism and callousness. About the same time, his mother died. Left alone in the world now, he was inflamed with a new anger in his protests against the fascists, the bourgeoisie, the politicians, the profiteers and parasites. In an outburst of fury he heaped the most violent curses on their heads-and then walked out of the furrier shop, as a tiger might escape the zoo, seeking with burning eyes the way back to the jungle. He followed the trail of his collective soul among the factory chimneys belching their smoke into the skied future.

Because of his well-known identification with the Left, the big factories shut their doors against him. For a long time he was without work till he was given a job in the Syndicate Offices, on the recommendation of his comrades, and found himself in a group of white-collar workers whose faces were pallid from long hours of indoor labor, their backs curved and their eyes red from steadily gazing at the black, little, dancing print.

He soon became a central figure in the large Syndicate, just as he had been in the small furrier shop. The secretary