"I am
infected! I am infectious! I am charged with poison for my own
mind, and the minds of all mankind. Where I felt interest,
compassion, sympathy, I am turning into stone. Selfishness and
ingratitude spring up in my blighting footsteps. I am only so much
less base than the wretches whom I make so, that in the moment of
their transformation I can hate them."
As he spoke - the young man still holding to his cloak - he cast
him off, and struck him: then, wildly hurried out into the night
air where the wind was blowing, the snow falling, the cloud-drift
sweeping on, the moon dimly shining; and where, blowing in the
wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in
the moonlight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the
Phantom's words, "The gift that I have given, you shall give again,
go where you will!"
Whither he went, he neither knew nor cared, so that he avoided
company. The change he felt within him made the busy streets a
desert, and himself a desert, and the multitude around him, in
their manifold endurances and ways of life, a mighty waste of sand,
which the winds tossed into unintelligible heaps and made a ruinous
confusion of. Those traces in his breast which the Phantom had
told him would "die out soon," were not, as yet, so far upon their
way to death, but that he understood enough of what he was, and
what he made of others, to desire to be alone.
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