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“Electric light is only the molten fear of men,” he said, as he strode through the unreal haste of the crowds. “Men are afraid to look at the night and they have given it eyes as stiffly frightened as their own. Underneath the comforting glare of this second blindness they protect themselves. In a dim light men and women could not easily escape from each other, for the darkness would tend to press them together, but in this violent stare of light they are divided by a self-assured indifference. Watch them as they stride along with an air of gigantic, amusing importance. The crowd is really a single symbol of many isolations joined to a huge one. It sees only those people who are unpleasantly conscious of the electric glare, and who hurry through it with gestures of alert dislike, or with a slow and morbid desire for pain.”

This fancy made him feel conspicuously disrobed, and the glances of passing people became to him flitting symbols of derision directed at his beard and dirty clothes. As he looked up at the tall, unlit office buildings, grey and narrowly vertical, they reminded him of coffins standing on end and patiently waiting for a civilization to crumble, so that they might inter it and fall to the ground with their task completed. He reached the apartment-house section in which his parents lived—rows of three and four-story buildings almost exactly like each other, and standing like factory boxes awaiting shipment, but never called for. In front of each building was a little, square lawn hemmed in between the sidewalk and the curbstone—tiny squares of dusty green lost in a solved and colorless problem in material geometry. Carl greeted them with a gesture of ironical brotherhood as he hurried along the walk, while people, observing his downcast gaze and saluting hands, sometimes paused to doubt his sanity.