The clerk tapped his forehead, with a scowl, and contemptuously tossed over the envelope. Carl carelessly stuffed the sixteen dollars into a pocket and walked out upon the crowded down-town streets. The streets were touched with the middle of forenoon, that hour when the business section of an American city is most leisurely and nondescript in its make-up. The wagons and trucks were not yet bombarding time with the full climax of their inane roar and the flatly hideous elevated railroad trains were firing at longer intervals. Noise had not yet become the confused and staggering slave of an ill-tempered avarice. The nomads and idlers of the city’s populace were flitting in and out among housewives on an early shopping-tour and those sleekly bloated men who stroll belatedly to their offices. A sleepy young vaudeville actress, painted and satiated, hurried to some booking-agency; a middle-aged pickpocket emphasized his grey and white checked suit with sturdy limbs and examined passersby, with the face of a shaved fox; an undertaker, tall and old, paced along with that air of worried dignity which his calling affects; a fairly young housewife pounded the sedate roundness of her body over the pavement and held the hand of a small, oppressed boy; a stock-raiser from the west slid his bulky ruddiness along the street, while beneath his broad-brimmed hat his face held an expression of awe-stricken delight; a college-girl, slender and carefully hidden by silk, strove with every mincing twist of her body to remind you that she was pretty; a youth, trimly effeminate and attended by an inexpensive perfume, trotted along, eyeing the scene with an affected air of disapproval. The streets were cluttered with a ludicrous, artificial union of people--people who were close together and yet essentially unaware of each other’s presence, and the invisible, purposeless walls of civilization crossed each other everywhere. If he swerved two inches to the right the chained trance of this lonely farm-hand might strike the shoulder of this dully wounded chambermaid from the Rialto Hotel, and with this happening their lives might become an inch less burdened and struggling. Their sidelong glances cross for a moment, like tensely held spears, but they pass each other from cautious habit, striding to more prearranged and empty contacts. Civilization has raised wall-making to a fine art, striving to hide its dreamlessness beneath an aspect of complex reticence, and keeping its human atoms feeble and solitary, since pressed together they might break it into ruins. During the rush-hours of a city you can see those streams of people who are busily making and repairing the walls, but during the lulls in the fever upon city streets you may observe the stragglers, wanderers, and grown-up children who are not quite connected with this task and who humbly or viciously hurdle the barriers that separate them.