The man himself was not a pleasant object. The cart, meantime, had approached the fatal tree. Wood is now in very affluent circumstances. His car, a black Alfa Romeo, waited at the end of the subdivision. She rose to the fire to stoke it. Gray and tranquil world! Amazing, passionless world! A world in which days without meaning, days in which “we don’t want things to happen” followed days without meaning—until the last thing happened, the ultimate, unavoidable, coarse, “disagreeable.