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did not untie; he did not wish to open his wound. And his face, thinner from his illness and his loss, looked ten years older. The early happy ecstasy of youth was gone, and a bitter, mature recklessness took its place, and there was no hand to soothe him but Molly's, and she had gone back to Troy. He tried what ways were open to a man of his age and the class he had adopted, and he turned for distraction and relief and consolation to their doors. But at those portals, at the threshold of the houses where other men went in, he stopped. If his angel had deserted him, at any rate the beast had not taken its place. The vast solitude and the cruel loneliness, the isolation from his kind, made him an outcast too wretched not to cry for help and too clean to wallow in order to forget his state. His work saved his health and his brain. He made a model of an engine in plaster and went mad over it; he set it on a shelf in his room and when in June he drove his own engine and was an engineer on the New York Central, he knew his locomotive, body and soul and parts, as no other mechanic in the Company knew it. His chiefs were conscious of his skill and intelligence. There were jealousies and enmities, and instead of driving the express as he had hoped, he was delegated to a local on a branch line, with an Italian for fireman who could not speak a word of any but his own language. "You speak Italian, don't you, Fairfax?" his boss at the office asked him. ("Cielo azuro ... Giornata splendida...!") and he smelt the wet clay. "I can _point_," laughed the engineer, "in _any_ language! and I reckon I'll get on with Falutini." CHAPTER XVI The boss was a Massachusetts man and new to Nut Street, and Fairfax, when he took the paper with his orders from Rainsford's hand, saw for the first time in months a man of his own class, sitting in the revolving chair before the desk where his papers and schedules and ledgers were filed. The man's clothes were too thin for the season, his linen was old and his appearance meagre, and in his face with its sunken cheeks, the drooping of the eyes and the thinness of the brow, were the marks of the sea of life and its waste, and the scars of the storm. A year ago Fairfax would have passed Rainsford by as a rather pitiful-looking man of middle age. The boss, his thin hand opening and shutting over a small book which looked like a daily ledger, regarded the engineer in his red shirt as F
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