mood
upon him, the action was as instinctive as breathing. He moved back to
his chair by the window.

The evening was hot, on the street depressingly so, but up here after
the sun was set there was always a breeze, and it was cool and
comfortable. The man looked out over the sooty, gravelled roofs of the
surrounding lower buildings, and down on the street, congested with its
flowing stream of cars, equipages, and pedestrians. Times without number
he had viewed the currents and counter-currents of that scene, but never
before had he so caught its vital spirit and meaning. Born of the
elect,--reared and educated among them,--the supercilious superiority of
his class was as much a part of him as his name. While he realized that
physically the high and the low were constructed on practically the same
plan, he had been wont to consider them as on totally separate mental
planes. That the clerk and the roustabout on ten dollars a week,
breathing the same atmosphere,--seeing daily, hourly, minute by minute,
from separate viewpoints, the same life,--that they should have in
common the constant need of diversion had never before occurred to him.
Multitudes of times, as a sociologist, or as a literary man in search of
realism, he had visited the haunts of the under-man. Languidly,
critically, as he would have observed at the "zoo" an animal with whose
habits he was unacquainted, he had watched this rather curious under-man
in his foolish, or worse than foolish, endeavor to find amusement or
oblivion. He had often been interested, as by a clown at a circus; but
more frequently the sight had merely inspired disgust, and he had
returned to his own diversions, his own efforts to secure the same end,
with an all but unconscious thankfulness that he was not such as that
other. To-night, for the first time, and with a wonder we all feel when
the obvious but long unseen suddenly becomes apparent, the primary fact
of human brotherhood, irrespective of caste, came home to him. To-night
and now he realized, diminutive in the distance as they were, that the
swarm of figures that he had hitherto considered mere animals vain of
display were impelled upon the street, compelled to keep moving, moving,
without a pre-arranged destination, by the same spirit of unrest that
had sent him to the buffet. At that moment he was probably nearer to his
fellow-man than ever before in his life; but the truth revealed made
him the more unhappy. He had grown t