The glib suavity of a midsummer night sprinkled its sounds down the street and the doorsteps and walks were heavy with men, women and children, parading the uncomfortable drabness of their clothes and unwinding their idle talk. In pairs and squads, youths and girls strolled past Carl, laughing and playing to that exact degree of animal abandon tolerated by the street lights of a civilization, and sometimes crossing the forbidden boundary line, with little bursts of guilty spontaneity. Amid the openness of the street they were forced to become jauntily evasive of the old sensual madness brought by a summer evening, and they sought the refuges of crudely taunting words, snickering withdrawals, and tentative invitations. They were sauntering toward the kittenish excitements of ice-cream sundaes, moving pictures, and kisses traded upon the shaded benches in a nearby public park. Thought had subsided in their heads to a kindly mist that clung to the rhythm of their emotions, though in the main, their minds were merely emotions that vainly strove to become discreet. Most people are incapable of actual thought, and thinking to them is merely emotion that calmly plots for more concrete rewards and visions. Carl looked upon the people on the sidewalks with the attitude of an unscrupulous stranger, and in his fancy he measured them for material gains and attacks, without a trace of warm emotion in his regard. To him they were merely alien figures busily engaged in deifying the five senses, and they mattered no more than shadowy animals blind to his aims and presence. He had long since frozen his emotions in self-defense and nothing could unloosen them save the timidly mystical lyrics which he wrenched from the baffled surfaces of his heart. During the four years of his life as a soldier and hobo he had often looked upon some of the darker and more rawly naked shades of sexual desire in the people around him, but after a first period of mechanical curiosity he had drawn aloof from what he considered a blind, shrieking, fantastic parade. “This wearisome game of advancing and retreating flesh, always trying to lend importance to an essential monotone, can go to hell,” he had muttered to himself. “I’ll yield to my sexual desires at rare intervals, but I’ll do it in the brief and matter-of-fact manner in which a man spits into a convenient cuspidor.” Women to him were simply moulds of dull intrigue, irritating him with their pretenses of animation and with the oneness of their appeal.