But finally this life began to weary him because it could not reach the flimsy loneliness that stood within him. He carried within him at all times an audience of ghostly thoughts and emotions, and they were at last becoming bored with the stolen melodrama. He determined to practice an economy in movements and words, and he walked alone at night and on streets where the possibility of meeting someone who knew him would be distant. He watched the syncopated gliding of people with the irritation of a stranger. The men and women who drifted or bobbed along were cardboard mannikins to him and he vainly tried to give life to their flatness and lack of color. Sometimes he would pause and touch his arm and face, wondering at the odd inadequateness of their presence. Olga had become a living but invisible being who was constantly groping for him, with eyes unused to the outlines of earth, and sometimes finding his shoulder in a fleeting and accidental way. When this happened, he would turn around abruptly and berate his inability to extract her form from the concealing air. At such times he would often speak to her. “Olga ... Olga ... what is this unsought blindness that has come to both of us?” he would cry into the night air of a street. “A cruel chicanery ... a blurred and simple pause ... a little fantasy within a huge one? Am I a coward rolling in the mud that stretches before a vast gate? Life seems a fantastic conspiracy, panting and rattling in its efforts to hide the emptiness beneath it.... Olga ... take me to your burnished hermitage ... I am tired.” He would walk on, trying to imagine what her answer had been, and winning an elusive and deliberately wrought consolation that stayed for an hour and then gradually departed. His life had settled into the recurrence of these reactions, when a second invitation arrived from his wealthy uncle in the southern city, and he had accepted merely because he wanted a new arena for his struggle with a discredited reality--fresher targets and a change in the illusion’s surface. And now he was seated in the train that slowly rolled through the outskirts of a southern city and giving his eyes to the squalid negro section that unfurled before him.... CHAPTER XVII.