Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again--the arms of somebody else in Oliver's body--and a cold mouth hurting her cheek--and still she cannot speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so disturbingly has gone out of the door. XVI Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a distinguished street by any means--there are neither plate-glass shops nor 'residences' on it--just an ordinary street of little stores and small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman car. In a good many houses the lights are out already--it is nearly eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early--only the drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, “Dr. Edwin K. Buffinton--Chiropractor,” “McMurphy and Kane's,” “The Rossiter,” with its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap. Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin. Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together “don't, don't, don't,” in the whine of a nasty nurse. “All for the best, you know--all for the best, we're all of us sure of that. Love doesn't last--doesn't last--doesn't last--as good fish in the sea as ever were caught out of it--nobody's heart could break at twenty-five. You think you're happy and proud--you think you're lovers and friends--but that doesn't last, doesn't last, doesn't last--none of it lasts at all.” If he only weren't so _tired_ he could do something. But instead he feels only as a man feels who has been drinking all day in the instant before complete intoxication--his body is as distinct from him as if it were walking behind him with his shadow--all the colors he sees seem exaggeratedly dull or brilliant, he has little sense of distance, the next street corner may be a block or a mile away, it is all the same, his feet will take him there, his feet that keep going mechanically, one after the other, one after the other, as if they marched to a clock. There is no feeling in him that stays long enough to be called by any definite word--there is only a streaming parade of sensations like blind men running through mist, shapes that come out of fog and sink back to it, without sight, without number, without name, with only continual hurry of feet to tell of their presence.