He left a note for his mother on the kitchen table, donned his trench coat, and departed. Anticipation of the movie to be seen already began to rise in his breast. People in the huddled posture which rain enforces passed him as he walked to the business avenue where stores shone wetly and brightly in the rainy night. Two boys were standing outside a candy store and trying to get chewing gum from the box beside the newsstand. Cornelius, in his rising spirits, was tempted to stop and afford them the benefit of his childhood talent for such efforts, his ability to make the machine give freely by a certain trick. But he knew that the boys would merely be shy, or afraid of him, and perhaps even antagonistic. At the age of twenty-five, he said to himself, I am neither here nor there, and can no longer expect to return with ease to the world of the young, that cruel zoo inhabited by a special kind of animal.