He returned to his room between seven and eight o'clock, his body and mind completely fagged, feeling a crying need of some diversion, some escape from the thoughts that had been hounding him all day.
He made up his mind to read a little before going to bed, and all at once remembered a book that he had once begun a long time ago but had never finished: the story of two men who had bought a wrecked opium ship for fifty thousand dollars and had afterward discovered that she contained only a few tins of the drug.

He had never read on to find how that story turned out.

Suddenly he found himself repeating, "Twenty-five thousand dollars, twenty-five thousand dollars--where will _I_ find twenty-five thousand dollars ?" He wondered if he would go to jail if he failed to pay.

His interest in the book was gone in a moment, and he took up another of his favourite novels, the story of a boy at the time of Christ, a Jewish boy unjustly condemned to the galleys, liberated afterward, and devoting his life to the overthrow of his enemy, whom at last he overcame and humbled, fouling him in a chariot race, all but killing him.
He sat down in the huge leather chair, and, drawing it up to the piano lamp and cocking his feet upon the table, began to read.

In a few moments the same numbness stole into his head like a rising fog, a queer, tense feeling, growing at the back of his forehead and at the base of his skull, a dulness, a strange stupefying sensation as of some torpid, murky atmosphere.