In the midst of his restless, empty wanderings he often sat for a while in a little park that rustled and nodded upon the top of a bluff overlooking a broad river. There he would stare out at the wide, yellowish-brown flat of water, and the dull green convolutions of the distant shore, and the water would become an ethereal canvas where he painted fugitive salutes to the woman who had fled from life’s semblances. Under the spell of a melting daze he would sit for hours, almost unconscious of the fact that he held a body of slowly breathing flesh. At one end of the park the line of benches turned sharply in toward the city, and this shaded place, guarded by bushes and trees, was known as “Rounder’s Corner.” It was frequented by thieves, drug peddlers, sly, lacquered women and an occasional vagrant, and they gathered there from twilight on and drained the fierce insincerities of conversation and whiskey, with sometimes the lucid edge of cocaine. Since Carl came to this spot only during the afternoons, he did not see these people until, one evening, he managed to absent himself from the Edleman home on the pretense of desiring a trip on a river steamboat, and strolled into the park. He sat on a bench and looked around him, trying to become interested in the immediate contortions of the fantasy. One glance told him the identity of the social circle into which he had dropped and he felt a jerk of attention, for the more openly rough and cruel people in life were to him reflections of his ghostly self, spied in a coarsely exaggerated mirror but none the less valid. Fresh from the lazy inanities of the Edleman house, he felt a little baffled vigor--the ghost lamenting its lack of exercise--and he longed to roll once more in that plastic phenomenon which men insist on calling mud. It was only through plastering himself with the concentrated moistness of earth that he could force himself to believe, for a time, in the reality of life, and he welcomed his chance to repeat this process. He scanned the whispering, laughing, loose-faced people around him and turned over in his mind different ways of approaching them, since he knew how easy it was to heap fuel upon their suspicions.