At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment he always held back.  So much was at stake, and it was so essential that his first choice should be decisive.  He dreaded stupidity, timidity, intolerance.  The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were what he sought.  He must reveal himself only to a heart versed in the tortuous motions of the human will; and he began to hate the dull benevolence of the average face.  Once or twice, obscurely, allusively, he made a beginning—­once sitting down at a man’s side in a basement chop-house, another day approaching a lounger on an east-side wharf.  But in both cases the premonition of failure checked him on the brink of avowal.  His dread of being taken for a man in the clutch of a fixed idea gave him an unnatural keenness in reading the expression of his interlocutors, and he had provided himself in advance with a series of verbal alternatives, trap-doors of evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.

He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home at irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his apartment, and the critical scrutiny of Flint.  His real life was spent in a world so remote from this familiar setting that he sometimes had the mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a furtive passage from one identity to another—­yet the other as unescapably himself!

One humiliation he was spared:  the desire to live never revived in him.  Not for a moment was he tempted to a shabby pact with existing conditions.  He wanted to die, wanted it with the fixed unwavering desire which alone attains its end.  And still the end eluded him!  It would not always, of course—­he had full faith in the dark star of his destiny.  And he could prove it best by repeating his story, persistently and indefatigably, pouring it into indifferent ears, hammering it into dull brains, till at last it kindled a spark, and some one of the careless millions paused, listened, believed...

It was a mild March day, and he had been loitering on the west-side docks, looking at faces.  He was becoming an expert in physiognomies:  his eagerness no longer made rash darts and awkward recoils.  He knew now the face he needed, as clearly as if it had come to him in a vision; and not till he found it would he speak.  As he walked eastward through the shabby reeking streets he had a premonition that he should find it that morning.  Perhaps it was the promise of spring in the air—­certainly he felt calmer than for many days...

He turned into Washington Square, struck across it obliquely, and walked up University Place.  Its heterogeneous passers always allured him—­they were less hurried than in Broadway, less enclosed and classified than in Fifth Avenue.  He walked slowly, watching for his face.