One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself, a power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into a little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts of the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces; voices called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street went men looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly, sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam’s brain and he stood hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. He remembered a story he had once heard from John Telfer, a story of the disease and death that lurks in the little side streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren Street and from that into lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the elevated railroad and jumping on the first train went away south to walk for hours on a gravel roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn. Into Sam’s mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of, moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered how the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. “There are things not to be understood,” he told himself. “To live decently is a matter of good sense. I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a place again.” One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an incident of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full of youth, that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight, and walked in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully at the remembrance of some new detail of the affair.