On that day when he went to Sandusky, Hugh had several hours to wait for
his homebound train and went to walk by the shores of a bay. Some brightly
colored stones attracted his attention and he picked several of them up and
put them in his pockets. In the station at Pittsburgh he took them out and
held them in his hand. A light came in at a window, a long, slanting light
that played over the stones. His roving, disturbed mind was caught and
held. He rolled the stones back and forth. The colors blended and then
separated again. When he raised his eyes, a woman and a child on a nearby
bench, also attracted by the flashing bit of color held like a flame in his
hand, were looking at him intently.
He was confused and walked out of the station into the street. "What a
silly fellow I have become, playing with colored stones like a child," he
thought, but at the same time put the stones carefully into his pockets.
Ever since that night when he had been attacked in the motor, the sense of
some indefinable, inner struggle had been going on in Hugh, as it went on
that day in the station at Pittsburgh and on the night in the shop, when he
found himself unable to fix his attention on the prints of the Iowa man's
machine. Unconsciously and quite without intent he had come into a new
level of thought and action. He had been an unconscious worker, a doer
and was now becoming something else.
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