Every shade of this scene was an accurately friendly answer to Carl’s mood and he squandered the brooding light of his eyes upon all of the visual details outside of the train window. The mask of careless bitterness upon his face said its hello to the cowering and sinister apathy of the houses and people, and viciously he longed to leap out of the window and join the unashamed animal rites which these hovels and human beings were parading. Here an alien race was standing amid clouds of evil-smelling squalor and staring at its broken longings and dreams--staring with a wild hopelessness. This race had lost its own civilization and was clumsily imitating that of the white man, not because of any innate desire, but because it had been forced to blend into its surroundings or perish, and Carl felt that all of his life had also been an animated lie of flesh and speech, devised to aid him in escaping from the contemptuous eyes that vastly hemmed him in. And now, with the feelings of a man who had neatly murdered himself, he was planning to turn the knives of his thoughts and emotions upon other people, not for revenge, but because the marred ghost of himself harshly desired to convince itself that it was still alive. If this ghost had yielded to the subterfuges of kindness and gentleness it would have become too much aware of its own thin remoteness from life, and cruelty alone could induce it to believe that it was still welded to the actualities of existence. As Carl sat at the window he could often hear the grotesquely quavering, boldly mellow laughter of negro men trudging to their work, but these sounds did not express humor to him. They held the strong effort of men to flee from tormenting longings and the numbly vicious rebuke of poverty, and the sounds which these men released merely symbolized the long strides of their fancied escape. Laughter can be merely the explosive sound with which human beings seek to demolish each other--the indirect weapon of self-hatred. Carl laughed with a strained loudness, throwing a magnified echo to the negroes on the dusty roads outside, and a drowsily plump, middle-aged woman in an opposite seat opened her mouth widely and huddled into a corner, fearing that she might be attacked by a maniac. He gave her a glance and feasted upon her fear, for her shrinking attitude was falsely and deliciously persuading the ghost of himself that it still held a potency over other people.