vision free to follow his whole orbit his story would be more
intelligible: it would be easier to convince a chance idler in the
street than the trained intelligence hampered by a sense of his
antecedents. This idea shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of
each new seed of thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to
frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses and bars in his search for the
impartial stranger to whom he should disclose himself.

At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment
he always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential
that his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity,
timidity, intolerance. The imaginative eye, the 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