Street!—Why does no thing stay as it was? So I can catch up?
She breathed heavily. Her head was light, save in the very back under the coiled hair which tipped downward pulling up at her chin. She felt her stomach. Her knees were light. She felt her feet.—I could laugh! I am striped in heaviness and lightness. Laugh then!
The two walls of the street fell forward: in the air above the gutter they crashed in silence together and disappeared. The City was a maze of twisting streams.... Two men passed. They were arm in arm. They were sleek and full in the black coats shaped to their bodies. Their cheeks and their eyes were sleek and full of themselves. About the round head of each there was an Aura. Thick troubled, it beat outward like an emprisoned gas. A gaseous colorless world it was about the head of each, that veered against the other, drew in, thrust out, hostile. Impenetrable two men passed, arm in arm.
* * *
... A woman passed her. Her eyes were red spots in the soot of her face. The loose wide flesh of her feet at each step hurt. Her hands fell like the heads of slaughtered hens. Behind her, attached to the grey shawl that covered her head, a Wake like a scarf dragged dimly dark. It wavered from side to side: it was a disconsolate flutter forever behind her. A little boy crossed the street at her back: the scarf lifted, it avoided his bright eyes: it sagged down toward an ashcan, skimming the filth....
* * *
... Fanny stopped on the curb to let a wagon pass. Huge horses drew it. They were black with white-stroked withers, hair gathered thick above their pounding hoofs. A thin man perched above them; behind him, the iron cart heaped high with tawney dirt. He was imprisoned, this pallid man, between the soil and the horses. His hands held reins. From his white eyes two little Streams of red rose, curled, flecked at the horses’ steaming flanks, receded, thrust in the dirt behind, moved circling fitful about the soil and the horses. The roll of the wheels, the clank of the great hoofs, the cart’s metallic strain were a tissue of hostile voices hunting the still red search that streamed from his white eyes.
* * *
—There are no ones and one. You get in my way! You don’t exist!... She saw how this world was a manifold of veins, carrying blood, building flesh of life and house.
—I flow. I too am livid, flowing through You.