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| She was fifteen, or seventeen, and she came from somewhere far away. You could see it by the faraway look in her eyes. She slipped or forced her way through a crowd of strangers who were not just passively sullen, they were belligerently hostile. Yet this was not directed in any way at her; it was meant for everyone without distinction. |
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| There was a desperation in the crowd. A cloud of oppression hung over them as they hurried about with their eyes averted from one another, quick to smother any bursts of unreasoning joy that might contaminate the general mood of apocalypse and gloom. |
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| Cast about in so foreign a setting, she instinctively sought the consolation of concrete details: not necessarily familiar ones, she wasn't expecting that much, just any detail she could catalogue and name. "The red sock on the foot of that baby in the stroller...the scrollwork in the molding of that doorframe, which is set into the stone and painted blue." |
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| She stopped at a corner where a traffic device was holding back the harried walkers so that traffic in the street might pass. She felt the crowd pressing against her, as if deliberately keeping her off balance: she felt the anonymous hostility of the crowd. She struggled desperately to pick out individual faces, but her eyes could only rest on them for an instant before turning away in revulsion, rushing to blot out the image. She saw faces corroded by hate, in bondage to the most vulgar passions, like dogs who are blind and must find their way with their nose in the gutter. She longed for a glimpse of an intelligent face, one with some awareness behind it that would see her and recognize her, causing the face to smile. She would read the smile, and if she found that it was without malice, she would approach the boy, smiling also. If he held her eyes at that point, rather than breaking away to vanish into the crowd, then she would speak. |
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