Lowell Lake was a tall man， rather thin， with thin sandy hair<br >and a distant， preoccupied though amiable disposition， as though<br >the world did not reach him as it reaches other men and all the<br >voices around him were pleasant but very faint. His attention<br >was liable to wander off at any time and he was always asking<br >people to repeat things. He gave the impression that people<br >bored him， although not in a bad way: actually， they seemed to<br >lull him. He was frequently discovered half-asleep at his desk，<br >gazing vacantly out the nearest window.<br > One morning not long after his thirtieth birthday， Lowell<br >woke up with the sudden realization that his job was not tempo-<br >rary. It was as though a fiery angel had visited him in his sleep<br >with a message of doom， and he leaped from bed in a state bor-<br >dering on panic， staring wildly about him. His job wasn t tem-<br >porary and things weren t going to get any better--not that they<br >were going to get any worse， barring some unforeseen catastro-<br >phe like atomic warfare or mental illness， but they weren t going<br >to get any better. That was the whole point. He d found his<br >level， and here he was， on it. He was the managing editor of a<br >second-rate plumbing-trade weekly， a job he did adequately if<br >not with much snap. It was， he realized with a dull kind of<br >3 ~~<br >