and he returned the severe, or
humourous, or appraising gaze of each with a look nicely proportioned
to the passer, giving back exactly what was given to him, and no more.
He did not stare, for nobody stared. He just looked and looked away,
and was as mannerly as was required.

A negro went by arm in arm with a girl who was so sallow that she was
only white by courtesy. He was a bulky man, and as he bent greedily
over his companion it was evident that to him she was whiter than the
snow of a single night.

Women went past in multitudes, and he knew the appearance of them all.
How many times he had watched them or their duplicates striding and
mincing and bounding by, each moving like an animated note of
interrogation! They were long, and medium, and short. There were
women of a thinness beyond comparison, sheathed in skirts as featly as
a rapier in a scabbard. There were women of a monumental, a mighty
fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments.
There were slow eyes that drooped on one heavily as a hand, and quick
ones that stabbed and withdrew, and glanced again appealingly, and slid
away cursing. There were some who lounged with a false sedateness, and
some who fluttered in an equally false timidity. Some wore velvet
shoes without heels. Some had shoes, the heels whereof were of such
inordinate length that the wearers looked as though they were perched
on stilts and would topple to perdition if their skill failed for an
instant. They passed and they looked at him; and from each, after the
due regard, he looked away to the next in interminable procession.

There were faces also to be looked at: round chubby faces wherefrom the
eyes of oxen stared in slow, involved rumination. Long faces that were
keener than hatchets and as cruel. Faces that pretended to be scornful
and were only piteous. Faces contrived to ape a temperament other than
their own. Raddled faces with heavy eyes and rouged lips. Ragged lips
that had been chewed by every mad dog in the world. What lips there
were everywhere! Bright scarlet splashes in dead-white faces. Thin
red gashes that suggested rat-traps instead of kisses. Bulbous, flabby
lips that would wobble and shiver if attention failed them. Lips of a
horrid fascination that one looked at and hated and ran to. . . .
Looking at him slyly or boldly, they passed along, and turned after a
while and repassed him, and turned again in promenade.

He had a sickness of them al