Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/153

Rh It was a veritable relaxing. The city was going to treat him more kindly and with more pity!

Even the movements of the longshoremen seemed less superhuman, less hieratic. The workers, on the point of quitting work, surprised him by breathing like simple mortals, their arms crossed or hanging loosely at their sides, or wiping their foreheads with the back of their sleeves. Laurent found them as handsome this way, and more kindly. At the moment of going home, of bathing themselves in the intimacy of home life, they laughed, having become listless in advance, and a langor descended from their backs to their legs, and their embraces sought objects less rough and less inert.

Laurent set foot upon reality once again.