It was the sight of the curb-brokers. There they stood crowding the broad street with their bodies, clamoring the air with their cries and their scurried gestures. David went close to watch them: for they were a thick knot on the street, they were like a swarm of bugs overrunning a lump of refuse in a road. To distinguish more than the blotch of their thronging and the low drone of their noise from which sharp voices pierced, one had to bring near one’s face. David saw, now, that they were mostly young men, rather shabbily dressed since they must be prepared for every weather and for any scrimmage, with sharp faces--very red or very pale--in constant motion. Their eyes darted, their mouths worked, they dashed notes in little books, thrust forth hands above the gesticulating mass and spun away to other knots of the buffet with hats over ears and upturned collars. They looked up at the high windows. There, perched half outwards in rows were other men, behind ranks of telephones that they perpetually shrilled in, and thrust from them. They leaned out, with contorted fingers signaled to their colleagues below. Hands jutted from the crowd, fingers twirled answering signals. They used the language of the deaf and dumb. If David had not heard the incessant burr of their voices above the shuffle of their feet, he might have taken them for deaf-mutes. A same something strained and unquickened about the muscles of their throats and jaws which he had noticed in deaf-mutes. He understood that only by signs and battle-calls could they in the street and the men perched in the windows carry on their communications. He admired their adroitness. The disturbance rose and fell: had its hours of thick frenzy and its streaks of deliquescence. But it was unending. David had learned that the curb-brokers dealt in securities not listed in the new Exchange that stood like a Temple beyond the turmoil of the street. No other difference. So he knew these solemn walls were hypocrites. Within them, older men, better clad, better-paunched, buffeted and bid and bounced: at times--he was told--floored each other, blackened eyes, broke noses. All one: the naked and the canopied gutter: the scrimmage under sky and the scrimmage under marble. Buildings tiered and teemed, and in each cranny a fight. With polite tricks, men plotted and plundered, swung the whole of their vast might of concentrated work into the anarchy of Distribution. To the end of deflecting from its even channels the sap of Toil to their own bellies. Scrambling masters and myriad slaves who had not even the grace of scrambling for themselves.