He crossed a bridge above a narrowly turbid river. The oily lights and toiling tug-boats were to him an inexplicable affront. Their stillness and slow motion insulted his passion for speed and with the spite of a child he looked down at his feet for a stone to throw at them. Finding a pavement block, he cast it into the river and rushed along, feeling for a second an exquisite relief. He passed into a crowded theater and business section. The strained melee of lights and noises became an intensely sympathetic audience, urging on his race, and the faces and forms of human beings met in an applauding confusion. With the cunning of a blind animal, he darted through their ranks and avoided collisions. Finally he reached another apartment-house region--large brick boxes without a vestige of expression. “The faces are gone!” he cried, with a gasping incredulity, as though inanimate things had alone become real to him. Moonlight, unable to fathom their petty baldness, clung to them with an attitude of limpid disgust. Thickly contented families, mild and tightly garnished, issued from the doorways, trundling to some moving-picture show or ice-cream palace. An aspect of well-washed and hollow serenity protested against Carl’s direct flight. Wrapped by this time in a warmly merciful daze, he did not detect the drably swaying counterfeit of happiness that would have awakened within him a maniacal response. He sped down street after street like an inhuman hunter, and came to rows of wooden houses separated by large fields and blackguarded by the smoke of nearby factories and mills. An attitude of mildewed supplication--a beggar rising from ferns and mud--lifted itself over the scene. Rushing along, he plunged into the open country, where wild flowers, ditches, and fields of corn pungently conversed with moonlight in a language too simple and formless for human ears to catch. But Carl’s ears had become inhuman, and he started a loud talk with the growing objects around him, revelling in their sympathy and advice. By this time his long, half-running walk had weakened him and he began to lurch over the soft earth of the road like a crushed and fantastic drunkard. * * * * * The ingenuous brilliance of a cloudless morning stood hugely over the green fields and yellowish brown roads and an air of alert innocence went exploring between the flowers and ditches. Harriet Radler walked slowly down the country road on her way to the schoolhouse where she ruled a little band of demons, drudges, minor poets, and clowns. She lingered along the roadside, sometimes stooping to tear a tiger lily from the shallow ditch. Slender and short, a pliant virginity twined itself around her body. Her young face, pink and barely whipped, had been marked by a tentative sorrow and was hungering for the actual battle. Her black and white clothes lazily flirted with imps of morning air and were encouraged by her eyes.