As he and Joel drove to the station it seemed to Eugene that he was returning to a world from which he had been absent for years. And the return was not a pleasant one. As they entered the little town, and began to drive swiftly down a street that led to the station, the little frame houses with their new architectures — their faded little strips of “front-yard” grass, cement walks, and cement-yard walls, looked cheap, flimsy, new and dreary — the image of a life that was itself as rootless, insecure, and drearily pretentious as the little painted frames it lived in.

It was Sunday, and as they drove up to the station he saw before a Greek confectionery and newspaper store a group of the town sports. They were dressed up in their cheap Sunday finery, and their faces wore a smirk. As Joel got out of the car, the sports tried to look nonchalant and easy in their relations with one another, but a kind of uneasy constraint had fallen upon them and held them until he had gone. And yet he had not noticed them or done anything that might have caused them this discomfort.

In the gravelled parking space before the station several cars were drawn up. Their shining bodies glittered in the hot sunlight like great beetles of machinery, and in the look of these great beetles, powerful and luxurious as most of them were, there was a stamped-out quality, a kind of metallic and inhuman repetition that filled his spirit, he could not say why, with a vague sense of weariness and desolation. The feeling returned to him — the feeling that had come to him so often in recent years with a troubling and haunting insistence — that “something” had come into life, “something new” which he could not define, but something that was disturbing and sinister, and which was somehow represented by the powerful, weary, and inhuman precision of these great, glittering, stamped-out beetles of machinery. And consonant to this feeling was another concerning people themselves: it seemed to him that they, too, had changed, that “something new” had come into their faces, and although he could not define it, he felt with a powerful and unmistakable intuition that it was there — that “something” had come into life that had changed the lives and faces of the people, too. And the reason this discovery was so disturbing — almost terrifying, in fact — was first of all because it was at once evident and yet indefinable; and then because he knew it had happened within the years of his own life, few and brief as they were — had happened, indeed, within “the last few years,” had happened all around him while he lived and breathed and worked among these very people to whom it had happened, and that he had not observed it at the “instant” when it came. For, with an intensely literal, an almost fanatically concrete quality of imagination, it seemed to him that there must have been an “instant”— a moment of crisis, a literal fragment of recorded time in which the transition of this change came. And it was just for this reason that he now felt a nameless and disturbing sense of desolation — almost of terror; it seemed to him that this change in people’s lives and faces had occurred right under his nose, while he was looking on, and that he had not seen it when it came, and that now it was here, the accumulation of his knowledge had burst suddenly in this moment of perception — he saw plainly that people had worn this look for several years, and that he did not know the manner of its coming.

They were, in short, the faces of people who had been hurled ten thousand times through the roaring darkness of a subway tunnel, who had breathed foul air, and been assailed by smashing roar and grinding vibrance, until their ears were deafened, their tongues rasped and their voices made metallic, their skins and nerve-ends thickened, calloused, mercifully deprived of aching life, moulded to a stunned consonance with the crashing uproar of the world in which they lived. These were the dead, the dull, lack-lustre eyes of men who had been hurled too far, too often, in the smashing projectiles of great trains, who, in their shining beetles of machinery, had hurtled down the harsh and brutal ribbons of their concrete roads at such a savage speed that now the earth was lost for ever, and they never saw the earth again: whose weary, desperate ever-seeking eyes had sought so often, seeking MAN, amid the blind horror and proliferation, the everlasting shock and flock and flooding of the million-footed crowd, that all the life and lustre and fire of youth had gone from them; and seeking so for ever in the man-swarm for man’s face, now saw the blind blank wall of faces, and so would never see man’s living, loving, radiant, and merciful face again.

Such were the faces that he now saw waiting on the station platform of this little Hudson River town — two dozen faces from the mongrel and anonymous compost of like faces that made up America — and with a sudden blinding flash of horror and of recognition, it now came to him that they were just the faces he had seen everywhere, at a thousand times and places in “the last few years.”

He had seen them in their last and greatest colony — the huge encampment of the innumerable submerged, the last and largest colony of the great mongrel and anonymous compost that makes up America: he had seen them there, hurtling for ever, from the roaring arch of the great bridge, with their unceasing flight, projectile roar, unnumbered flood, in their great and desolate beetles of glittering machinery — boring for ever through the huge and labyrinthine horror of that trackless jungle of uncounted ways, beneath the grime and rust and swarm and violence and horror of Fulton Street, past all the vast convergences, the threat and menace of the empty naked corners, the swarming and concentric chaos of Borough Hall, and with beetling and unceasing flight through Clinton Street, on Henry Street, through the Bedford section, out through the flat and limitless swelter known as “the Flatbush section,” beneath the broad and humid light of solid skies, through ten thousand rusty, grimy, nameless streets that make up that huge and trackless swelter — and most horrible of all, a flood of nameless faces, rootless and unnumbered lives, hurtling blindly past for ever in hot beetles of machinery along those broad, wide, and splendidly desolate “avenues,” that were flanked upon each side by the cheap raw brick, the gaudy splendour, of unnumbered new apartment houses, the brick and stucco atrocities of unnumbered new cheap houses, and that cut straight and brutal as a spoke across the labyrinthine chaos of the Brooklyn jungle — and that led to God knows where — to Coney Island, to the beaches, to the outer districts of that trackless web, the unknown continent of Long Island — but that, no matter where or how they led, were always crowded with the blind horror of those unnumbered, hurtling faces, the blind horror of those great glittering beetles of machinery drilling past for ever in projectile flight, unceasing movement and unending change, the blind horror of these unknown nameless lives hurtling on for ever, lost for ever, going God knows where!

Yes, this was the thing — blindly, desperately, unutterably though he felt it — this was the thing that had put this look — the “new look”— the horrible, indefinable, and abominably desolate and anonymous look into the face of people. This was the thing that had taken all the play and flash of passion, joy, and instant, lovely and mercurial life out of their living faces, and that gave their faces the look of something blunted, deadened, stunned, and calloused.

This was the thing that had given people “the new look”— that had made man what he had become — that had made all these people waiting on the platform for the train what they were — and now that he had to face this thing again, now that he had to be thrust back in it, now that, after these three days of magic and enchantment, he must leave this glorious world that he had just discovered — and be thrust brutally back again into the blind and brutal stupefaction, the nameless agony and swelter of that life from which he came — it seemed to him he could not face it, he could not go back to it again, it was too hard, too full of pain and sweat and agony and terror, too ugly, cruel, futile, and horrible, to be endured.

No more! No more! And not to be endured! To discover for three days — three magic swift-winged days — that enchanted life that had held all his visions as a child in fee — to be for just three brief and magic days a lord of life, the valued friend, the respected and well-loved companion of great men and glorious women, to discover and to possess for three haunting and intolerable lovely days the magic domain of his boyhood’s “America”— the most fortunate, good and happy life that men had ever known — the most true and beautiful, the most RIGHT— and now to have it torn from him at the very instant of possession — and to c............