He returned to his home, repeating the soft treachery of his words while his fists still longed to lunge out at the faces in front of him, but the shrewdness of a ghost determined to regain a semblance of life by cleverly deceiving and punishing the people around it came to his rescue and controlled his body. His parents had felt wrathful at the presence of something which they could only dimly see and which he made no effort to clarify, but life had taught them to make a god of submission, and a heavy tenderness mingled with an alert fear crept into their posture toward him. He trudged back to the loquacious, coarse emptiness of his clerkship at the tobacco shop and shunned the world that he had previously inhabited, for he feared that if he met anyone whom he knew he would feel again the irresistible inclination to interrogate their throats, and he knew that these impulses would only lead to his own destruction. When he accidentally met some acquaintance on the street, he would hurry on like a nervous criminal, ignoring the other’s greetings. He prowled about the city, still in search of a violent dream that could offer its delusion of reckless strength to the mutilated spirit whose complaints drove him on. He ran to the soiled raptures of prostitutes and sensually oppressed, adventurous girls who could be picked up on the streets, and gave them a twisted symphony of blows, curses, whispered insinuations, lies, while he revelled in the illusion of cruelty that was lending a false reality to the thin futilities of his mind and flesh. With a mixture of brutality and delicately simulated caresses, he overawed these women and they felt themselves in the presence of a charming, abstracted fiend, whose kaleidoscopic insincerity only made them long to change it to a gesture of actual love. He sought the company of thieves and hoodlums, and at first they distrusted him because his restrained manners and gently removed look were not proper credentials, but when they saw how eager he was for the impact of fists, and how he could take a blow and rise with a grin of stunned delight, they accepted him as an eccentric brother. They did not know that these actions were not born of courage, but were caused by a gigantic longing for physical pain--pain that could shock his numb spirit into a feeling of sharply hideous communion with an actual world.