The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of the running boys. “Run, you little devils,” she cried. They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the lights. “Give me a silver dollar,” she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp. The two boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her. Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing, alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and dropped it down the neck of the driver. In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam’s head was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all effort burned in him. “It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth,” he thought. “He comes to a fine end in life.” On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the steamer. “I have borne three children and can bear more.” His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain, and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him. He thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company. “Else why am I here?” he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the seat in front. “Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about seeking Truth?” His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her hand. “Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have been,” he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he thought, was being tossed about by life.