All through the afternoon he wandered up and down the crowded pavements of the great city. In the course of his weary pilgrimage he entered many shops and offices sickly yet doggedly; sickly yet doggedly he made the offer of his services. Some of the answers he met with were not intelligible; some of them were. Yet in spite of every rebuff, of every conspiracy on the part of fortune, of the increasing sense of bodily suffering, of the aches that stole over his limbs, of the faintness that crept over him owing to these long hours of unaccustomed physical and mental exertion and absence of food, he forced himself to go on. What were such sufferings, such journeyings, such adventures, such vicissitude in comparison with the ten long years in which his beloved Odysseus was banished from the shores of Ithaca! What clay was this that already it should begin to quail? How those great ones of old would have mocked him had he dared to confess to them that he felt distressed! Yet he did feel distressed. It was almost useless to deny it. As for the tenth time that afternoon, he was told “To take himself off, and to look lively about it,” a formula which repetition had enabled him to recognize, and experience had indicated the only course to pursue, despair and humiliation, accompanied by terror, that most active of all his enemies, crept upon him, and as the clocks of the great city were striking five, tears sprang to his eyes. Almost in the same moment he had dashed them away, had proudly overcome them. What if the great Agamemnon could have seen him! How would he be able to meet those mighty ones, how would he be able to grasp their hands, to look into their faces, if this was the measure of his courage? By this time he had come into Cannon Street, hard by to Saint Paul’s. On the left side of the street, along which he passed, were great blocks of gloomy warehouses. Flights of stone steps ran up to their entrances; and as he limped by one of these, involuntarily he sank down in sheer weariness upon a bottom step. He felt bitterly hungry, yet he had no means of satisfying his pangs, for there was not a penny in his pocket; and the only food he had had that day had been a little milk and bread at eight o’clock that morning. Yet he still fought with all the resolution of which he was capable against the physical weakness which now held him so inexorably in its clutch. Again he began to recite the Iliads under his breath, not now because the joy of battle was in his veins, but because he sought to derive sustenance from those high-hearted ones who looked on valour as their right.