Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/45

Rh of life. He had a curious impression of being face to face, for the first time in his life, with realities,—in spite of the paradoxical fact that a vagueness, seemingly a bewilderment, was upon him.

All his life Hugh Gaylord had dwelt in cities. He had traveled far: sometimes in motors, usually in luxurious sleeping cars, occasionally in steamships. Yet he had never really been outside of cities. He knew the hurrying throngs, the great buildings, the busy streets. The shops, the theaters, the gaiety had been acquaintances as long as he could remember. He had never dreamed of a world without these things. Yet, in an instant, all of them seemed infinitely distant. Strangest of all, they suddenly didn't seem to matter.

It was an impression that all his life there had been a cloud before his vision, and all at once he could see clear. Here, not in those swarming cities, was reality. The cities had been built in a day; the other factors that had been so necessary in his life—his clubs, his motor cars, his amusements, even much of the great world of business—were merely mushroom growths of a little handful of centuries that men called the age of civilization. Strangely, they no longer seemed to him the basic things of existence. Rather now, for the first time in his days, he was face to face with life,—life in its simplest phases, with all its unrealities and superficialities swept away.