From the adjoining bar rose the music of
popping corks and flowing liquids. The barmaids were besieged. Clouds of
smoke hung in the air, and the heat was terrific. Julian felt it clinging
to him as if with human arms as he slowly walked over the thick carpet,
glancing about him. Humanity touched him on every side. At one moment an
elderly woman, with yellow hair and a fat-lined face, enveloped him in
her skirts of scarlet and black striped silk. The black chiffon that
swept about her neck and heaving shoulders fluttered against his face.
Her high-heeled boots trod on his. He seemed one with her. Then she had
vanished, and instantly he was in the arms of a huge racing-man, who wore
gigantic pink pearls in his shirt front, and bellowed the latest slang to
a thin and dissipated companion. It seemed to Julian that he was kicked
like a football from one life to another, and that from each life he drew
away something as he bounded from it, the fragment of a thought, the
thrill of a desire, the indrawn breath of a hope. Like a machine that
winds in threads of various coloured silks, he wound in threads from the
various coloured hearts about him,--red, white, coarse, and fine. And,
half-unconsciously, was he not weaving them into a fabric? Never before
had he understood the meaning of a crowd, that strange congregation of
passions and of fates which speaks in movements and is melodious in
attitudes, which quarrels in all its parts, silently, yet is swayed
through and through by large impulses, and as an intellect far more keen
and assertively critical than the intellect of any one person in it.
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