First Street-Sweeper:
And what of it?
The Drunkard:
Just you wait. Or, we’ll say, why don’t people shriek when they’re in the greatest pain, but are in a sort of dumb, endless brooding? Or again, why is it that there’s sometimes a child who doesn’t learn how to play and dies an early death? And then it stares at you so. Why do they close the eyes of the dead? Why? Why? To stop it from staring at you
First Street-Sweeper:
What?
The Drunkard:
What? Why, eternal sorrow. And he, Elan Chol, he belongs to that sort.
Second Street-Sweeper:
To what sort?
The Drunkard:
Why, the dark sort. Black angels have been seen, or fateful shadows without a body, too, who live a queer life of their own, and anyone who’s born from such a connection (for sometimes they enter a human bed), anyone who’s taken his origin from there, he’s ill-fated.
First Street-Sweeper:
What?
The Drunkard:
He’s ill-fated. Where there’s anyone of that kind about, it isn’t a fit place for people to be in. And
