seeing a delight in the computation of his
chances; at once a fighter and a gambler, like those with whom he
rubbed shoulders in the roaring ways. He overtaxed his energy, and in
any case there must have come reaction. It came with violence soon
after that day at Malvern.

The weather was hot; one should have been far away from these huge
rampart-streets, these stifling burrows of commerce. But here toil and
stress went on as usual, and Piers Otway saw it all in a lurid light.
These towering edifices with inscriptions numberless, announcing every
imaginable form of trade with every corner of the world; here a vast
building, consecrate in all its commercial magnificence, great windows
and haughty doorways, the gleam of gilding and of brass, the lustre of
polished woods, to a single company or firm; here a huge structure
which housed on its many floors a crowd of enterprises, names by the
score signalled at the foot of the gaping staircase; arrogant
suggestions of triumph side by side with desperate beginnings; titles
of world-wide significance meeting the eye at every turn, vulgar names
with more weight than those of princes, words in small lettering which
ruled the fate of millions of men;--no nightmare was ever so crushing
to one in Otway's mood. The brute force of money; the negation of the
individual--these, the evils of our time, found there supreme
expression in the City of London. Here was opulence at home and superb;
here must poverty lurk and shrink, feeling itself alive only on
sufferance; the din of highway and byway was a voice of blustering
conquest, bidding the weaker to stand aside or be crushed. Here no man
was a human being, but each merely a portion of an inconceivably
complicated mechanism. The shiny-hatted figure who rushed or sauntered,
gloomed by himself at corners or made one of a talking group, might
elsewhere be found a reasonable and kindly person, with traits,
peculiarities; here one could see in him nothing but a money-maker of
this or that class, ground to a certain pattern. The smooth working of
the huge machine made it only the more sinister; one had but to
remember what cold tyranny, what elaborate fraud, were served by its
manifold ingenuities, only to think of the cries of anguish stifled by
its monotonous roar.

Piers had undertaken a task and would not shirk it; but in spite of all
reasonings and idealisms he found life a hard thing during those weeks
of August. He lost his sleep, tu