That was in the day-time. But with the dusk, the discreet shutting of
doors and the retreating steps of the last patient, a change came. It
was like the subtle resistless withdrawal of a tide--a draining away of
power. He could do nothing against it. He could only sit motionless,
bowed over his papers, striving to keep a hold over the personality
that was slipping from him. And then into the emptiness there flowed
back slowly, painfully, a strange life--a stream choked and muddied at
its source--breaking through.
It was a physical thing. Some sort of nervous reaction. With the
dread of that former break-down overshadowing him he yielded
deliberately. He would leave the house and walk--anywhere--but always
where there were people--down Regent Street, sweeping like a broad
river into a fiery, restless lake. There he let go altogether, and the
crowds carried him. He eddied with them in the glittering backwaters
of the theatres, and studied the pallid, jaded faces that drifted in
and out of the lamp-light with the exaggerated attention of a mind on
guard against itself. He hated it all. It emphasized and justified
his aloofness from the mass of men. These people were sick and
ugly--sicklier and uglier in their pleasure-seeking than in their
stubborn struggle for survival, which had at least some elemental
dignity. It was from their poisoned lives that women like Gyp Labelle
sucked their strength. It was their childish perverted instincts that
made her possible.
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