Good sports and excellent
fellows he had thought them yesterday. To-day he had no words for them.
He simply knew that they grated upon every nerve in his body and that he
loathed them. For the first time he began to be frightened. What was
this thing that had happened to him? How was it possible for him to
continue his daily life?
As soon as he was out of the station, his troubles began again. A veil
seemed to have been torn from before his eyes. Just as in London every
face into which he had looked, every building which he had passed, had
seemed to him unfamiliar, appealing to an altered system of impressions,
so here, during that brief walk, a new disgust was born in him. The
showy-looking main street with its gingerbread buildings, all new and
glittering with paint, appalled him. The larger villas--self-conscious
types all reeking with plaster and false decorations--set him shivering.
He turned into his own street and his heart sank. Something had indeed
touched his eyes and he saw new and terrible things. The row of houses
looked as though they had come out of a child's playbox. They were all
untrue, shoddy, uninviting. The waste space on the other side of the
unmade street, a repository for all the rubbish of the neighborhood,
brought a groan to his lips.
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