and horror of Fulton Street, past all the vast convergences, the threat and menace of the empty naked corners, the swarming and concentric chaos of Borough Hall, and with beetling and unceasing flight through Clinton Street, on Henry Street, through the Bedford section, out through the flat and limitless swelter known as “the Flatbush section,” beneath the broad and humid light of solid skies, through ten thousand rusty, grimy, nameless streets that make up that huge and trackless swelter—and most horrible of all, a flood of nameless faces, rootless and unnumbered lives, hurtling blindly past for ever in hot beetles of machinery along those broad, wide, and splendidly desolate “avenues,” that were flanked upon each side by the cheap raw brick, the gaudy splendour, of unnumbered new apartment houses, the brick and stucco atrocities of unnumbered new cheap houses, and that cut straight and brutal as a spoke across the labyrinthine chaos of the Brooklyn jungle—and that led to God knows where—to Coney Island, to the beaches, to the outer districts of that trackless web, the unknown continent of Long Island—but that, no matter where or how they led, were always crowded with the blind horror of those unnumbered, hurtling faces, the blind horror of those great glittering beetles of machinery drilling past for ever in projectile flight, unceasing movement and unending change, the blind horror of these unknown nameless lives hurtling on for ever, lost for ever, going God knows where!
Yes, this was the thing—blindly, desperately, unutterably though he felt it—this was the thing that had put this look—the “new look”—the horrible, indefinable, and abominably desolate and anonymous look into the face of people. This was the thing that had taken all the play and flash of passion, joy, and instant, lovely and mercurial life out of their living faces, and that gave their faces the look of something blunted, deadened, stunned, and calloused.
This was the thing that had given people “the new look”—that had made man what he had become—that had made all these people waiting on the platform for the train what they were—and now that he had to face this thing again, now that he had to be thrust back in it, now that, after these three days of magic and enchantment, he must leave this glorious world that he had just discovered—and be thrust brutally back again into the blind and brutal stupefaction, the nameless agony and swelter of that life from which he came—it seemed to him he could not face it, he could not go back to it again, it was too hard,
