furrowed brow, were what he sought. He must reveal himself only
to a heart versed in the tortuous motions of the human will; and
he began to hate the dull benevolence of the average face. Once
or twice, obscurely, allusively, he made a beginning--once
sitting down at a man's side in a basement chop-house, another
day approaching a lounger on an east-side wharf. But in both
cases the premonition of failure checked him on the brink of
avowal. His dread of being taken for a man in the clutch of a
fixed idea gave him an unnatural keenness in reading the
expression of his interlocutors, and he had provided himself in
advance with a series of verbal alternatives, trap-doors of
evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.

He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home
at irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his
apartment, and the critical scrutiny of Flint. His real life was
spent in a world so remote from this familiar setting that he
sometimes had the mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a
furtive passage from one identity to another--yet the other as
unescapably himself!

One humiliation he was spared: the desire to live never revived
in him. Not for a moment was he tempted to a shabby pact with
existing conditions. He wanted to die, wanted it with the fixed
unwavering desire which alone attains its end. And still the end
eluded him! It would not always, of course--he had full faith in
the dark star of his destiny. And he could prove it best by
repeating his story, persistently and indefatigably, pouring it
into indifferent ears, hammering it into dull brains, till at
last it kindled a spark, and some one of the careless millions