She said that she always arranged the house beautifully for him, with
dust covers gay as a summer resort. The window-boxes, she stated
virtuously, were festively in bloom. And there was always Mattie to
see to his comfort. There was no excuse, beyond his sentimentality,
for the habit into which he dropped of staying late at his office.
Mattie had reported that he never came home to dinner. However, his
explanation, given to Eva upon her return in the autumn, was the point
upon which her sympathy for his plight laughingly rested. The fact
that construction of the new city went on relentlessly, undampened
by the weather, meant nothing to her; the fact that he worked under
pressure brought forth from her the comment that American men were
almost revolting in their frenzy over their drab business; but when he
told her that he could better conceive of the ultimate in height when
gazing from the high windows of his office at the panorama of the city
by night she understood. Somewhere in the jewelled pattern of this city
surrounded by water there lay, also brightly jewelled, the inspiration
that he had felt to be failing him. Until the squares of light that
were windows had turned black, he told her, he would lean from his own
window and look down on this fabric of the latest assumption of man.