‘I know well enough: you can’t. You’ve got to go the round like the rest,’ he said, with a laugh which was like a sound uttered by a wild animal rather than a human voice. The man was in my power, and I struck him, miserable as he was. It seemed a relief thus to get rid of some of the fury in my mind. ‘It’s a lie,’ I said; ‘I go because I please. Why shouldn’t I gather a band of my own if I please, and fight those brutes, not fly from them like you?’ He chuckled and laughed below his breath, struggling and cursing and crying out, as I struck him again, ‘_You_ gather a band! What could you offer them?--where would you find them? Are you better than the rest of us? Are you not a man like the rest? Strike me you can, for I’m down. But make yourself a master and a chief--you!’ ‘Why not I?’ I shouted again, wild with rage and the sense that I had no power over him, save to hurt him. That passion made my hands tremble: he slipped from me in a moment, bounded from the ground like a ball, and with a yell of derision escaped, and plunged into the streets and the clamour of the city from which I had just flown. I felt myself rage after him, shaking my fists with a consciousness of the ridiculous passion of impotence that was in me, but no power of restraining it; and there was not one of the fugitives who passed, however desperate he might be, who did not make a mock at me as he darted by. The laughing-stock of all those miserable objects, the sport of fate, afraid to go forward, unable to go back, with a fire in my veins urging me on! But presently I grew a little calmer out of mere exhaustion, which was all the relief that was possible to me. And by and by, collecting all my faculties, and impelled by this impulse, which I seemed unable to resist, I got up and went cautiously on.