He shook himself, and walking over to the sideboard poured out a glass of Cognac and drank it as though it were wine. Sidwell did not often drink spirits. Experience had taught him that to begin usually meant to end with regret the following day; but to-night, with his present mood upon him, the action was as instinctive as breathing. He moved back to his chair by the window.
The evening was hot, on the street depressingly so, but up here after the sun was set there was always a breeze, and it was cool and comfortable. The man looked out over the sooty, gravelled roofs of the surrounding lower buildings, and down on the street, congested with its flowing stream of cars, equipages, and pedestrians. Times without number he had viewed the currents and counter-currents of that scene, but never before had he so caught its vital spirit and meaning. Born of the elect,--reared and educated among them,--the supercilious superiority of his class was as much a part of him as his name. While he realized that physically the high and the low were constructed on practically the same plan, he had been wont to consider them as on totally separate mental planes. That the clerk and the roustabout on ten dollars a week, breathing the same atmosphere,--seeing daily, hourly, minute by minute, from separate viewpoints, the same life,--that they should have in common the constant need of diversion had never before occurred to him. Multitudes of times, as a sociologist, or as a literary man in search of realism, he had visited the haunts of the under-man. Languidly, critically, as he would have observed at the "zoo" an animal with whose habits he was unacquainted, he had watched this rather curious under-man in his foolish, or worse than foolish, endeavor to find amusement or oblivion. He had often been interested, as by a clown at a circus; but more frequently the sight had merely inspired disgust, and he had returned to his own diversions, his own efforts to secure the same end, with an all but unconscious thankfulness that he was not such as that other. To-night, for the first time, and with a wonder we all feel when the obvious but long unseen suddenly becomes apparent, the primary fact of human brotherhood, irrespective of caste, came home to him. To-night and now he realized, diminutive in the distance as they were, that the swarm of figures that he had hitherto considered mere animals vain of display were impelled upon the street, compelled to keep moving, moving, without a pre-arranged destination, by the same spirit of unrest that had sent him to the buffet. At that moment he was probably nearer to his fellow-man than ever before in his life; but the truth revealed made him the more unhappy. He had grown to consider his own unhappiness totally different and infinitely more acute than that of others; he had even taken a sort of morbid, paradoxical pleasure in considering it so; and now even this was taken from him. Not only had his own secret skeleton been visible when he believed it concealed, but all around him there suddenly sprang up a very cemetery of other skeletons, grinning at his blindness and discomfiture. His was not a nature to extract content from common discomfort, and but one palliative suggested itself,--the dull red decanter on the sideboard. Rising again and filling a glass, he returned and stood for a moment full before the open casement of the window gazing down steadily.