and Roumanian Jews apart. He could name the provinces from which
Italians and Germans came with few errors.

But the most interesting set of categories, according to which he filed
away the various faces he saw was that of their ruling passions. There
was the scholar, the sport, the miser, the courtesan, the little
shopkeeper, the clerk, the housewife, the artist, the brute, the
hypocrite, the clergyman, the bar-hound, the gambler. The charm of this
classification was that the categories were not mutually exclusive, and
permitted infinite variation.

Mr. Neal became as devoted to this fascinating game as ever any
enthusiast has been to billiards, golf, baseball or poker. He looked
forward all day, while in the midst of the ancient grind of Fields,
Jones & Houseman, to the moment when he could establish himself in a
position of vantage on a subway car, and get back to his study of faces.
All night long he dreamed of faces--faces wise and foolish, good and
evil.

Yet more and more the ugliness in the subway faces oppressed Mr. Neal.
Sometimes he looked into faces loosened by liquor and saw such an empty
foulness looking out at him that he was heartsick. Then he would look at
all the faces about him and see sin in manifold guise marking all of
them. The sodden eyes of disillusion, the protruding underlip of lust,
the flabby wrinkles of dissipation, the vacuous faces of women: it was a
heart-breaking picture gallery.

Every face was stamped with the little passion peculiar to it--the mark
of its peculiar spirit. The mouths, especially, betrayed the souls
within. Somewhere Mr. Neal had once read weird stories of souls seen to
escape from the bodies of dying persons, and always they had been seen
to issue from the open mouths of the corpses. There was a singular
appropriateness in this phenomenon, it seemed to Mr. Neal, for the soul
stamped the mouth even before it marked the eyes. Lewd mouths, and
cunning mouths, and hateful mouths there were aplenty. Even the mouths
of children were old in evil.

"I'm sorry I've learned it," breathed Mr. Neal one day. "Now I must
always look into a man's soul when I look into his face."

It was true. Men who could hide secret sins from bosom friends--even
from their wives--were defenseless against this little clerk hanging to
a strap--this man with the serious pale face and the large grey eyes who
had learned by years of systematic observation to pierce every barrier
of reserve.