pretended idealism which veiled their shiftlessness, recklessness, and inability.
He had success in life because he shirked no difficulties. He knew that things were in one's way to overcome, and he overcame them.
But somehow there did not come up a feeling of pride within him, and a question arose in his mind, a question that pierced his soul with a feeling of loss. How did he overcome all the hardships in life? He had chosen the hardships which lay in the path of certain things he wanted. Now, what was there within him now that then lived strongest of all to attain his ambition? He felt that he would have to delve far, far into his inner man to estimate the cost of his success. "Why, I worked! I strove!"—he uttered these words aloud, in a tone almost audible to those about him. He wished to regain his feeling of assurance.
“Ah, Illinsky, how shrunken and dishevelled he looks! Now that fellow was of a consuming ambition, he worked, was unsuccessful.”—All these facts he would deny, as though they were the most ignominious imputations upon his character —just because he could not rise out of his sphere. That savage enthusiast with the air of desperate recklessness, how he works himself into fervor and endeavors to infuse it into the youths by his own example of forced, inflamed bravado:—his whole being is an outcome of desperate, purposeful neglect.
Somebody greeted him. In the voice of the man, there seemed to him a slight ring of fellowship. There was also a_ tone of surprised recognition and of tolerance to the deserter in this greeting. .
It made him feel at home in the midst of the crowd. His look softened and became a stare: the tense strain of irony gave way. He was in a perturbed, nervous state, in which the clearness of his intellect, whose guidance he had followed so successfully, was battling with his simple, passionate emotions, kindred to his being; for they were his own almost from birth, cherished through youth, the time of emotional growth.
His look again assumed its amused sharpness.
"Warshauer is staring at me bitingly—that scoundrel—he has to live and draw his sustenance from the delusive ideas of this crowd. Ideas?—What are they but an outcome of unsatisfied longing, longing nourished—no, not nourished—pricked into life by dissatisfaction, struggle, discontent. And when this longing with its incessant gnawing becomes unbearable in this stifling atmosphere, it is ejected into a form, an idea having a definiteness of purpose of what they seek and which they fanatically uphold. Let them but be satisfied and achieve material success!"
His consciousness was effectively contradicting him. He opened his coat: it was warm. The feeling of perfect freedom and unconventionality was stealing over him. A Russian girl attracted him. She was a Russian Jewish type. Her attire was neglected. Her hair was combed straight off from a broad forehead leaving in clear outline a soulful face with short, stumpy features, high cheek- bones, full lips with a tender expression around them, and dark eyes wherein there was a world of emotion and deep, keen intelligence.
He knew her: he felt the kinship existing between them. She swept by him and rushed to a friend whom she greeted in the usual, stormy fashion of the Russians.
He followed her with his eyes, and even proceeded further with the throng to observe her. She drew him on.
But he lost her in the maze of glowing faces—faces upon faces with essentially different characteristics blurred into one glowing, quivering conglomerate. He could not discriminate; everything seemed to be pervaded by a sameness. He began to realize with vague definiteness that what drew him to this girl permeated the whole mass.
He began to feel conscious of the life of this mass and of himself merging into the general coloring; he had thrown over his unified impression of all he beheld.
He extricated himself from the crowd and stepped aside. He was lost in reflec-