There was not one face I knew; not one smiled; not one relaxed or contracted with a thought, an emotion, a fancy; but all were clear, hard, and fixed in a vice, so that though they were infinite in their variety--no two eyebrows set the same way, no two mouths in the same relation to the eyes--the variety seemed the product of a senseless ingenuity and immense leisure, as of a sublime philatelist. Hardly one spoke; only the women moved from left to right instead of straight on, and their voices were inaudible when their lips moved. The roar in which all played a part developed into a kind of silence which not any one of these millions could break; the sea does not absorb the little rivers more completely than this silence the voices of men and women, than this solitude their personalities. Now and then a face changed, an eyebrow was cocked, or a mouth fell; but it meant less to me than the flutter as of a bird when drop by drop the rain drips from the beeches and gives a plash and a trembling to one leaf and then another in the undergrowth. There is a more than human force in the movement of the multitude, more than the sum of all the forces in the arched necks, the grinding chest muscles, and the firm feet of the horses, the grace of the bright women, the persistency of the tall men and thick men. They cannot stop. They look stupid or callous or blank or even cruel. They are going about another’s business; they conceal their own, hiding it so that they forget (as a drunkard forgets where he has hidden his gold) where they have hidden it, hiding their souls under something stiffer and darker than the clothing of their bodies. It is hard to understand why they do not sometimes stop one another, to demand where the soul and the soul’s business is hid, to snatch away the masks. It was intolerable that they were not known to me, that I was not known to them, that we should go on like waves of the sea, obeying whatever moon it is that sends us thundering on the unscalable shores of night and day. Such force, such determination as moved us along the burning streets might scale Olympus. Where was he who could lead the storming-party? Between a pack of cabs and a pack of ’buses there was a quiet space of fifty yards in length; for a little while it seemed that the waves were refusing their task. There was not one black coat, not one horse, not one brightly loaded ’bus: no haste. It was a procession.