anticipated that I should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had
a preoccupied, hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the
ticket-clerk, having made me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of
his lair to get my ticket, did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and
inimical interest in this drone who caused delay to busy people.

It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.

'These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
_our_ wealth and luxury!' I thought; for I was just beginning, at that
period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable
directness. They frightened me with their vivid humanity.

I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
From the young man's soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession
of compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people.