His misery in that place had all been typical, a random sample. The city was cursed with sleazy inevitability--the most sombre thoughts acquired a picked-over character, and pleasure came ready-mixed for quick satiety. He had brought a girl to the hotel because the city expected it of him: loneliness had been industrialized. Yet fornication itself was very solitude. When he thought, here, of his wife and children and his own rooms, they seemed like health, and he could not feel that was banal. And when he invoked the presence of Caro it was to pit her strength against a city, or the world.