I was almost as odd to men as I had been to the Beast People.

My trouble took the strangest form. I could not make myself think that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, and that they would any moment begin to regress, to show first this bestial mask and then that.

(...) though I do not expect that the terror of that island will ever altogether leave me. At most times it lies far in the back of my mind, a far away cloud, a memory; but there are times when the little cloud grows untill it covers the whole sky. Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, enthusiastic and bright; others dull and dangerous; others unsteady, insincere, none that have the caln ability of a realistic soul. I feel as though the animal was rising up through them; that the deradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger size. I know this is an illusion; that these seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women, men and women for ever, perfectly reasonable creatures, full of human needs and kindness, slaves of no Law, beings different from the Beast Folk. Yet I disappear from them, from their curious glances, their questions and help. I want to be away from them and alone.

I could not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors were fragile safeguards. I went out into the streets to fight with my fantasy, and heard women mew after me; sly, hungry men looked jealousy at me; pale workers went coughing by me with tired eyes; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves.
Then I turned aside into some church, and even there, it seemed that the priest gibbered "Big Thinks", even as the Ape-man had done; or into some library, and there the faces over the books seemed but patient creatures waiting for victim. They seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be. And even it seemed that I too was not reasonable creature, but only an animal with some strange chaos in its brain, which sent it to walk alone, like a sheep.

H. Wells "The Island of Dr. Moreau"