In the car his thoughts had been at once intensely personal and inchoate. He was thinking back. He resolved to write his mother an affectionate letter of apology. Yes: he would write to Adelaide as well. He had not wanted to bother them. Many a time, they had made him feel--oh, perhaps not these two, but _they_--how little it was wise to bother them. He was going to a new life. He wished to start on it, alone. There was no reason in not cutting clean, when cut one had to. His last thought gave him pause. He was going to a new life. A new life. Life.... The car clanked and screeched, the braked wheels slid--to a halt; the conductor bawled out the place of transfer. Quincy was suddenly aware only of the pungent dampness in the car. He pushed his way to the platform, clumsily. But what hindered him was solely the fact of his suit-case. He stepped down--into a wide, flat puddle. And he was piqued, only because his shoes were freshly shined. He righted himself, waiting for a safe chance to cross. With his thoughts had come the need of moving. And this had stopped his thoughts. He stood midway in the sopping thoroughfare with the sun’s glad drench above his head. The new life began. * * * * * He heard the voices. The starting, clanking, abruptly halted cars that swung with groan of wood and iron. The darting flash of wagons, brittle and uproarious of wheel over the asphalt’s crevices or the weave of tracks. The heavier trucks, plunging along with perched, gesticulating drivers, that gave forth their rumble like a flood of undertone shot through with lighter notes. The dull-rhythmed matrix--the crowd’s shuffle--wherein the metallic urge of cars, the tangent flurries of light wheels, the impress of thick masses glowed and hummed and pounded while the air swung response. And through it all, catching it up, knitting it together, the web--the web whereof now Quincy grew aware. For it was none of these: not the traffic’s voice, not the crowd’s shuffle. It was the crowd itself. Everywhere--interminably movemented, yet inexorably fixed. The base, the weave, the limits of this cacophony. The web, gapped solitarily by the air--and air that stifled, died within the web’s cloying interstices. The crowd closed on Quincy’s heart. And Quincy felt the crowd. He grasped his burden tightly, and pushed ahead. But meantime, and for the first time, he was a-feel with this new substance. What it gave him went to all the senses. It was a sharp, quick taste that drew and a pungent odor that clouded eyes. It was subtle and it was slight. Yet, once impinged upon his being, it remained. And now, he recognized it:-- A desire not to go on--a yearning to cease altogether. A weariness, which in its scope was cosmic, yet in its application seemed almost not to be!