Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/82

 soft fall of snow, and remembered that it was Saturday. His studies lay around him, dead of interest, like the ruins of an avocation. He went downstairs, listlessly, his hands in his pockets, and ate his breakfast with the mechanical appetite which follows a stress of emotion. And then he muffled himself up in his overcoat and winter gloves, and with his head bent against a mild wind he began to walk.

He had intended to walk in a comfortable daze, quite thoughtless, with the snow-flakes clogging his eyelashes and the wind crooning in his ears. But his mind was unusually alert, his observation greedy of every sight he passed; and when he came to the main business street of the town—turning northward in an unconscious habit of direction—he saw the life around him with an involuntary wonderment, as if it were suddenly new to him; and he watched the actions of the men and women on the sidewalks and in the shops as if they had been a race of animals whose cheerful acceptance of a brief and tragic lot was an inexplicable mystery to him. He saw them even with pity as they smiled and nodded and chattered to one another—with the pity which one would feel for the playfulness of a butcher's animals; and he did not at all confound himself in their fate, but walked among them as unconsciously self-superior as a philosopher who has just proved the nothingness of all things, and who feels the personal importance of his triumphant intellectuality and the great distinction of his act.

The feeling raised him to a lonely isolation, and as he neared the quieter suburbs he was reminded of