He came after a while to the conclusion that most of those who went up and down with him were in the same unregarded condition.
The city appeared quite habituated to this state of affairs; hordes of them came and went unconfronted between banked windows of warmth and loveliness, past doors from which light and music overflowed into the dim street in splashes of colour and sound, where people equally under the prohibition lapped them up hungrily like dogs at puddles.

Sometimes in the street cars or subways he brushed against fair girls from whom the delicate aroma of personality was like a waft out of that country of which his preferences and appreciations acknowledged him a native, but no smallest flutter of kinship ever put forth from them to Peter.
The place was crammed full of everything that anybody could want and nobody could get at it, at least not Peter, nor anybody he knew at Siegel Brothers.

And at the lodging house they seemed never to have heard of the undiminished heaps of splendour that lay piled behind plate glass and polished counters.

It was extraordinary, incredible, that he wasn't to have the least of them.
As the winter closed in on him, the restrictions of daily living rose so thick upon him that they began to prevent him from his dreams.

He could no longer get through them to the House with the Shining Walls.