After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
for the most part, a passive role, going with them from place to place and
drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome,
and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the
circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred
the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into
his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets,
getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the
faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars
in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes,
the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim
prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In
his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only
as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his
own.
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