mpossible, or if not impossible--' And here he
paused again and raised his eyes to the dark clouds and lurid sky
overhead. 'The man who gave that cry! if I could but find him! he must
have seen--'

'What could he see?' I asked. But there arose in my mind something like
contempt. A visionary! who could not speak plainly, who broke off into
mysterious inferences, and appeared to know more than he would say. It
seemed foolish to waste time, when evidently there was still so much to
see, in the company of such a man; and I began already to feel more at
home. There was something in that moment of anguish which had wrought a
strange familiarity in me with my surroundings. It was so great a relief
to return out of the misery of that sharp and horrible self-realization,
to what had come to be, in comparison, easy and well known. I had no
desire to go back and grope among the mysteries and anguish so suddenly
revealed. I was glad to be free from them, to be left to myself, to get a
little pleasure perhaps like the others. While these thoughts passed
through my mind, I had gone on without any active impulse of my own, as
everybody else did; and my latest companion had disappeared. He saw, no
doubt, without any need for words, what my feelings were. And I proceeded
on my way. I felt better as I got more accustomed to the place, or
perhaps it was the sensation of relief after that moment of indescribable
pain. As for the sights in the streets, I began to grow used to them. The
wretched creatures who strolled or sat about with signs of sickness or
wounds upon them disgusted me only, they no longer called forth my pity.
I began to feel ashamed of my silly questions about the hospital. All the
same, it would have been a good thing to have had some receptacle for
them, into which they might have been driven out of the way. I felt an
inclination to push them aside as I saw other people do, but was a little
ashamed of that impulse too; and so I went on. There seemed no quiet
streets, so far as I could make out, in the place. Some were smaller,
meaner, with a different kind of passengers, but the same hubbub and
unresting movement everywhere. I saw no signs of melancholy or
seriousness; active pain, violence, brutality, the continual shock of
quarrels and blows, but no pensive faces about, no sorrowfulness, nor the
kind of trouble which brings thought. Everybody was fully occupied,
pushing on as if in a race, pausing for nothing.

The gl