noon
A man who is strong and survives can hardly pace the pavements of a city for days searching for employment , his pocket every day becoming lighter , without feeling in after life that he is richer by something which all the universities in the world could not have given him . The most dramatic of poets can not imagine , even afar off , what such a man feels and thinks , especially if his temperament be nervous and foreboding . How foreign , hard , repellent , are the streets in which he is a stranger , alone amidst a crowd of people all intent upon their own occupation , whilst he has none ! At noon , when business is at its height , he , with nothing to do , sits down on a seat in an open place , or , may be , on the doorstep of an empty house , unties the little parcel he has brought with him , and eats his dry bread . He casts up in his mind the shops he has visited ; he reflects that he has taken all the more promising first , and that not more than two or three are left . He thinks of the vast waste of the city all round him ; its miles of houses ; and he has a more vivid sense of abandonment than if he were on a plank in the middle of the Atlantic . Towards the end of the afternoon the pressure in the offices and banks increases ; the clerks hurry hither and thither ; he has no share whatever in the excitement ; he is an intrusion .