Judson Paley, a well-to-do inheritor of a Revolutionary era estate, is an especially pensive and distressed character. As Judson sits in a dentist’s office, the dentist and hygienist operating in his numb and raw mouth, Judson ruminates on his lonely singularity and develops an anxious tic: biting and chewing the insides of his bottom lip. After Judson leaves the dentist’s office, he neurotically contemplates stealing an officer’s service pistol. Judson escapes a stupefying heat wave outside to the barber where he yet grapples with the intensity of his helpless and hopeless humanity. 

After the barbershop, Judson visits Prince’s Grill and is taken with his waitress, Janice, who recalls for him a suspicion that the grill is a “house of prostitution.” Judson, wanting to both court and _devour _Janice, is ultimately, awkwardly allayed— his advances unrequited. He then visits a nearby bank to withdraw cash for his sister. At the bank, all of Judson’s episodic bouts with a marginal and exterior humanity activate, neurotically bidding he steal the bank security officer’s gun and turn it on himself. The gun, however, and clumsily unbeknownst to Judson, is locked by its safety catch. Judson is later delivered to his home where he and his sister live— his mania misdiagnosed as an effect of the heat.