But she looked up as she walked the
streets at the high, ugly walls of brick and steel and stone, and her
heart misgave her.
So for the time being she promised herself a holiday. In the afternoon
she walked the length of Hastings Street, where the earth trembled with
the roaring traffic of street cars, wagons, motors, and where folk
scuttled back and forth across the way in peril of their lives. She
had seen all the like before, but now she looked upon it with different
eyes; it possessed somehow a different significance, this bustle and
confusion which had seemingly neither beginning nor end, only sporadic
periods of cessation.
She sat in a candy parlor and watched people go by, swarming like bees
along the walk. She remembered having heard or read somewhere the
simile of a human hive. The shuffle of their feet, the hum of their
voices droned in her cars, confusing her, irritating her, and she
presently found herself hurrying away from it, walking rapidly eastward
toward a thin fringe of trees which showed against a distant sky-line
over a sea of roofs. She walked fast, and before long the jar of solid
heels on the concrete pavement bred an ache in her knees.
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