monotony, and the endless, aimless, never-changing
round. I heard myself calling to them to be still--to be still! to pause
a moment. I felt myself stumble and turn round in the giddiness and
horror of that movement without repose. And finally, I fell under the
feet of the crowd, and felt the whirl go over and over me, and beat upon
my brain, until I was pushed and thrust out of the way lest I should
stop the measure. There I lay, sick, satiate, for I know not how
long,--loathing everything around me, ready to give all I had (but what
had I to give?) for one moment of silence. But always the music went on,
and the dancers danced, and the people feasted, and the songs and the
voices echoed up to the skies.

How at last I stumbled forth I cannot tell. Desperation must have moved
me, and that impatience which after every hope and disappointment comes
back and back,--the one sensation that never fails. I dragged myself at
last by intervals, like a sick dog, outside the revels, still hearing
them, which was torture to me, even when at last I got beyond the crowd.
It was something to lie still upon the ground, though without power to
move, and sick beyond all thought, loathing myself and all that I had
been and seen. For I had not even the sense that I had been wronged to
keep me up, but only a nausea and horror of movement, a giddiness and
whirl of every sense. I lay like a log upon the ground.

When I recovered my faculties a little, it was to find myself once more
in the great vacant plain which surrounded that accursed home of
pleasure,--a great and desolate waste upon which I could see no track,
which my heart fainted to look at, which no longer roused any hope in me,
as if it might lead to another beginning, or any place in which yet at
the last it might be possible to live. As I lay in that horrible
giddiness and faintness, I loathed life and this continuance which
brought me through one misery after another, and forbade me to die. Oh
that death would come,--death, which is silent and still, which makes no
movement and hears no sound! that I might end and be no more! Oh that I
could go back even to the stillness of that chamber which I had not been
able to endure! Oh that I could return,--return! to what? To other
miseries and other pain, which looked less because they were past. But I
knew now that return was impossible until I had circled all the dreadful
round; and already I felt again the burning of that desire th