As with the houses, homes of mystery, so with the men and women one passed; homes, they too, of things hidden yet more deep. The noise of the streets, at first paralysing, died down to a familiar rumble, and the ear began to distinguish voices in the tide. Sounds of crying, calls for help, hailings, laughter, tears, separated themselves and appealed. You heard them, like the cries of the drowning, drifting by you upon a dark tide-way. You could do nothing; a word would have broken the spell. The mask which is always over the face would have covered the tongue or throttled the larynx. You could do nothing but hear. Finally, the passing faces became sometimes penetrable, betrayed by some chance gleam of the eyes, some flicker of the lips, a secret to be shared, or conveyed by a hint some stabbing message out of the deep into the deep. That is what I mean by the soul at the window. Every one of us lives in a guarded house; door shut, windows curtained. Now and then, however, you look up above the street level and catch a glimpse of the scared prisoner inside. He may be a satyr, a fairy, an ape or an angel; he's a prisoner anyhow, who sometimes comes to the window and looks strangely out. You may see him there by chance, saying to himself like Chaucer's Creseyde in the temple, "Ascaunces, What! May I not stonden here?" And I found out for myself that there is scarcely a man or woman alive who does not hold such a tenant more or less deeply within his house. Sometimes the walls of the house are transparent, like a frog's foot, and you see the prisoner throbbing and quivering inside. This is rare. Shelley's house must have been a filmy tenement of the kind. With children--if you catch them young enough--it is more common. I remember one whom I used to see nearly every day, the child of poor parents, who kept a green-grocer's shop in Judd Street, Saint Pancras, a still little creature moving about in worlds not recognised. She was slim and small, fair-haired, honey-coloured, her eyes wells of blue. I used to see her standing at the door of the shop, amid baskets of green stuff, crimsoned rhubarb, pyramided dates, and what not. I never saw her dirty or untidy, nor heard her speak, nor saw her laugh. She stood or leaned at the lintel, watching I know not what, but certainly not anything really there, as we say. She appeared to be looking through objects rather than at them. I can describe it no otherwise than that I, or another, crossed her field of vision and was conscious that her eyes met mine and yet did not see me. To me she was instantly remarkable, not for this and not for any beauty she had--for she was not at all extraordinary in that quality--but for this, that she was not of our kind. Surrounded by other children, playing gaily, circling about her, she was _sui generis_. She carried her own atmosphere, whereby in the company of others she seemed unaccountable, by herself only, normal. Nature she fitted perfectly, but us she did not fit.