Its splendors crushed them, filling them with
nostalgic longings. They bore on with eyes that were sick for a sight
of some homely, familiar thing that would tell them they were still
human, still denizens of a world they knew. The life into which they
fitted and had uses was as though perished from the face of the earth.
The weak man sunk beneath the burden of its strangeness. Its beauty
made no appeal to him. He felt lost and dazed in its iron-ringed
ruthlessness, dry as a skeleton by daylight, at night transformed by
witchfires of enchantment. The man and woman, in whom vitality was
strong, combatted its blighting force, refused to be broken by its
power. They desired with vehemence to assert themselves, to rebel, not
to submit to the sense of their nothingness. They turned to one
another hungry for the life that now was only within themselves. They
had passed beyond the limits of the accustomed, were like detached
particles gone outside the law of gravity, floating undirected through
spaces where they were nothing and had nothing but their bodies, their
passions, themselves.
To a surface observation they would have appeared as stolid as savages,
but their nerves were taut as drawn violin strings.
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