The following spring, when the Steegmullers left for Paris, Francis gave Ralph the keys to the office he kept in a building at 608 Fifth Avenue so he would have a quiet place to work. The office was on the eighth floor in a suite of rooms belonging to the jewellers Samuel and Augusta Mann, who guarded Ralph’s privacy, took him to lunch, and encouraged him to write. It was his until the Steegmullers returned in mid-October. Ralph wrote Francis in late June, “Until today, which is doing its best to smother me, my work has moved ahead with a kind of magic. I have been putting in a fairly full day of writing here at the office then leaving my ms until the next day and if I can continue this way I won’t mind how hot it gets and by October I can present the boys with a big thick headache of a novel.” Fanny too was pleased with the arrangement, writing in August, “Can I tell you what the use of the office has meant to Ralph? No better thing could have happened for him. Last week he had written 50 new pages since he went there the Monday after you’d gone, new pages, not rewritten ones. All of which makes me know that the book might have been finished by now had he had all along a suitable place to work.” Rampersad notes that Ellison’s presence there was unexpected in that white neighbourhood: “To catch the sunlight, Steegmuller had set up his typewriter next to a window that looked across to the roof of Radio City Music Hall. When white people there saw a black man sitting at a typewriter, they sometimes could not hide their curiosity or their alarm.” This might have proved to be a problem, Ellison observed, “had I not been consciously concerned with a fictional character who was bent upon finding his way in areas of society whose manners, motives and rituals were baffling.”