Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/58

30 stop them and ask questions. After the little persecution of veiled hints, of irony, of reticence, and the blind torture that he had undergone in the drawing-room of his guardians, to speak to them was like inhaling brisk country air after being in a hot-house of forced plants whose perfume made him giddy. He began to consider himself a sharer in the destiny of the lowly. His downtrodden weakness communed with their passive force. He conciliated stokers, machinists, draymen, laborers. They responded to the halting advances made by this repulsed child, morally neglected, misunderstood, severed from parental tenderness, whom the servants, scum of the common people, patterning themselves upon Felicité, treated as a burden upon the establishment.