the shop did not care two pins whether I bought anything or not. She was
indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. She was only
pretending to sell.

"This sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what
follows. But really it was not small. I mean it was the spark that lit
the line of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind.

"For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so
far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were
elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere
out of sight behind the scenes. Their busy-ness was but the outward
semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and
ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main
stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in
secret places. In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether
I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to
my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from
hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. It was all a
great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly
for purposes of their own. But the main current of their energies ran
elsewhere. I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be
expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the
whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it. The town was
doing this very thing to me.

"This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked
home to the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of
this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of
its hidden life.