Evening was falling as they stood before the great building, the home of their fortune of the night. The broad roadway lay between them and it. Carriages rolled perpetually by, motor-cars glided out of the dimness of one distance into the dimness of the other. Across the flood of humanity they gazed at the great blind building, which would soon be brilliantly lit up for them, because of what they had done. The carriages, the motor-cars filed by. A little later and they would stop in front of the monster, to give it the food it desired, to fill its capacious maw. And out of every carriage, out of every motor-car, would step a judge, or judges, prepared to join in the great decision by which was to be decided a fate. Both Claude and Charmian were thinking of this as they stood together, while the darkness gathered about them and the cold wind eddied by. And Charmian longed passionately to have the power to hypnotize all those brains into thinking Claude's work wonderful, all those hearts into loving it. For a moment the thought of the human being's independence almost appalled her. "It looks cold and almost dead now," she murmured. "How different it will look in a few hours!" "Yes." They still stood there, almost like two children, fascinated by the sight of the theater. Charmian was rapt. For a moment she forgot the passers-by, the gliding motor-cars, the noises of the city, even herself. She was giving herself imaginatively to fate, not as herself, but merely as a human life. She was feeling the profound mystery of human life held in the arms of destiny. An abrupt movement of Claude almost startled her. "What is it?" she said. She looked up at him quickly. "What's the matter, Claude?" "Nothing," he answered. "But it's time we went back to the hotel. Come along." And without another glance at the theater he turned round and began to walk quickly. He had seen on the other side of the way, going toward the theater, the colored woman in the huge pink hat, of whom he had caught a glimpse on the night when Alston Lake had fetched him and Charmian to see the rehearsal of the "locust-effect." The woman turned her head, seemed to gaze at him across the road with her bulging eyes, stretched her thick lips in a smile. Then she took her place in a queue which was beginning to lengthen outside one of the gallery doors of the theater. CHAPTER XXXVI