Clytie went upstairs to the familiar room, and took off her bonnet and gloves. In a few moments the boxes were brought up. When she had unpacked these and arranged their contents, and eaten as much as she could of the meal that Mrs. Gurkins prepared for her, the glorious afternoon had melted into night. She sat by the open window and looked out upon the hurrying street below. It was a Saturday evening. The whole population of the district was astir buying their Sunday provisions or their Sunday headaches. Bands of the youth of both sexes clattered noisily past, singing hoarsely or darting from pavement to roadway in loud, dissonant gaiety. Along the kerb stretched the line of costers' barrows with flaming naphtha torches, and the faces of the sellers and buyers stood out clear in the glare. A babel of sounds arose: the confused murmur of private conversations pitched in the discordant key of the unrefined, the raucous cries of the costers offering their wares, the shrill “Buy! buy!” of the butcher a few yards away and the rapid click of his steel, the doleful nasal dirge of a tramp woman holding a vague bundle looking like a baby in her arms, the continuous scraping of feet, the roar of the 'buses and carts in the roadway. Clytie had often before sat on Saturday evenings at her window, lost in the wonder of speculation upon the individualities of the units that composed this hurrying, bawling, laughing, cursing crowd. And now she felt the old fascination creep over her. The noise and movement acted as a counter-stimulus to the fierce whirl of emotions through which she had passed during the day. She lost for the time the sense of loneliness, soul-sickness, and bodily prostration in this external world of tumult. What did it all mean, this hurry and strain? Looked at as a whole, it seemed to indicate that life was intense, earnest, throbbing with infinite variety of passions, an end in itself, to be carried on, because it was life, to all eternity. It seemed real, practical, objective, obeying inscrutable, immutable laws. The planets circle round the sun; our solar system circles round another focal sphere. It is great, it is glorious, serving some great and glorious end; yet what that end is no man knoweth. And so with the collective life that surged beneath Clytie's window, yielding blindly to the unchanging laws that direct the cosmos. If this movement was meaningless and vain, then did the stars wander futilely in their courses. Sin and shame and misery, love and laughter and happiness, what did they matter in the progress of collective life? They are internal forces affecting its resistless march as little as the incessant motion of men affects the rotation of the earth.