The buildings which had been so unobtrusively familiar stood
out with sudden distinctness: he noticed a hundred details which had
escaped his observation. The people on the sidewalks looked like
strangers: he wondered where they were going and tried to picture the
lives they led; but his own relation to life had been so suddenly reversed
that he found it impossible to recover his mental perspective.
At one corner he saw a shabby man lurking in the shadow of the side
street; as the hansom passed, a policeman ordered him to move on. Farther
on, Woburn noticed a woman crouching on the door-step of a handsome house.
She had drawn a shawl over her head and was sunk in the apathy of despair
or drink. A well-dressed couple paused to look at her. The electric globe
at the corner lit up their faces, and Woburn saw the lady, who was young
and pretty, turn away with a little grimace, drawing her companion after
her.
The desire to see Miss Talcott had driven Woburn to the Gildermeres'; but
once in the ball-room he made no effort to find her. The people about him
seemed more like strangers than those he had passed in the street. He
stood in the doorway, studying the petty manoeuvres of the women and the
resigned amenities of their partners. Was it possible that these were his
friends? These mincing women, all paint and dye and whalebone, these
apathetic men who looked as much alike as the figures that children cut
out of a folded sheet of paper? Was it to live among such puppets that he
had sold his soul? What had any of these people done that was noble,
exceptional, distinguished? Who knew them by name even, except their
tradesmen and the society reporters? Who were they, that they should sit
in judgment on him?
The bald man with the globular stomach, who stood at Mrs.
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