filled by the hurry and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness
of buying.

Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and Isabel could,
when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vision, magnificent at
times, and at other times full of indignity and pain. They seemed to have
dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrimage through that squalid street by the
river-side, where presently they came to a market, opening upon the view
hideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions
of cars like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a
foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings (rising
gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories) on either hand
look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust that the hot breaths of
wind caught up and gent swirling into the shabby shops. Here they dreamed
of the eternal demolition and construction of the city, and farther on of
vacant lots full of granite boulders, clambered over by goats. In their
dream they had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious and
whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from the car, and
running out of the blaze of the avenue, quenched themselves in the shade
of the cross-street. A little strip of shadow lay along the row of
brown-stone fronts, but there were intervals where the vacant lots cast
no shadow. With great bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to
avoid these spaces as if they had been difficult torrents or vast
expanses of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a
place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before, moved
on. They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to be told that
people were out and again that they were in; and they had a sense of cool
dark parlors, and the airy rustling of light-muslined ladies, of chat and
of fans and ice-water, and then they came forth again; and evermore