It was his habit to think only in metaphors and similes, and in this way he evaded the realities that would otherwise have crushed him. He walked down the street, practicing an emotion of stolid submission, and this surface humility played pranks with his blonde-topped head and made his thin lips loosely unrelated to the rest of his face. As he strode through the business district of the city, with its sun-steeped frenzies of men and vehicles, the scene pressed upon him and yet was remote at the same time. It was as though he were studying a feverishly capering unreality and vainly striving to persuade himself that he formed a significant part of it. The unrelenting roar of automobiles, wagons and cars became the laughable and inarticulate attempt of a dream to convince him that it held a power over his mind and body. Men and women darted past him with a rapidity that made them appear to be the mere figments of a magic trick. Here he caught the thick tension of lips, and there the abstracted flash of eyes, but they were gone before he could believe that they had interfered with his vision. He paused beside a dark green news-stand squeezed under the iron slant of an elevated-railroad stairway and strove to pin the scene to his mind and fix his relation to the people who were jesting with his eyes. Young and old, dressed in complications of timidly colored cloth, each seemed to be running an exquisitely senseless race in the effort to gain a nonsensical foot on the other person. The masked rush of their bodies deprived them of a divided sexual appearance and lure--men and women, touching elbows without emotion, were swept into one lustreless sex which darted in pursuit of a treacherously invisible reward. The entire structure around them--buildings, signs, and iron slabs--stood like a house of cards carefully supported by an essence that rose from the rushing people, and Carl felt that if these men and women were to become silent and motionless, in unison, the house of cards would instantly lose its meaning and tumble down. “What are they gliding and stumbling toward?” he asked himself--the old, poignantly futile first question of youth. “Each man, with an ingenious treason, is trying to forget his inability at self-expression and soiling the void with an increasing burden that will prevent him from complaining too much. At some time in their lives all of these people felt, dimly or strongly, for a moment or for years, the ludicrous ache of a desire to stand out clearly against their scene, but the loaded momentum of past lives--the choked influence of past futilities--pushed them along with a force which they could not withstand. It is really a stream of adroitly dead men and women that is fleeing down this street--surreptitiously dead people living in the bodies of a present reality and perpetuating the defeated essence of their past lives.”