ticket, did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and
inimical interest in this drone who caused delay to busy people.

It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.

'These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
_our_ wealth and luxury!' I thought; for I was just beginning, at that
period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable
directness. They frightened me with their vivid humanity.

I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
From the young man's soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession
of compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people.
None of my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It
was uncanny.

Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained
prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn,
musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.
'Ah,' I thought, 'you little know what I know! I may appear a butterfly,
but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above you, beyond
you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by the turmoil
in my heart!' And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that they probably
knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten more than I
had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence about the
manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the _Staffordshire
Recorder_--a correspondence