Sometimes he became so
absorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through the
door without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up and
down nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose like
cattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gowns
worn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and with
painted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms that
housed cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.
In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South State
Street was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated and
made horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the wagging
jaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a building
opposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "Socialist
Headquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfect
expression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men did
not move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung the
socialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.
McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost in
meditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in the
street by the door and stared about.
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