On every street corner men and women offered for sale apples which the
passersby were too shocked to buy. Every living thing in the city was
in a state of shock. They cried with their eyes and with their pale
cheeks: “That this could have happened to New York!” If the fantastic
beauty of the panorama still gave them pleasure, it was now a thwarted,
masochistic pleasure. Up it went, the city, striving to pierce the
sky itself; defying the gods whilst trusting to the law of gravity of
the earth, inarticulately but consciously lampooning the great buried
cities of the past whilst through its streets swept the old, old misery
of money fear.
I went out on my balcony and looked, awe-stricken in spite of habit,
into the gnashing teeth of the sky-line. But there is something
unsettling in this sky-line; it cannot induce inertia. I dressed and
went down into the street, wandering aimlessly and with my head filled
with what I had endured the day before. The weather was abominable,
with gusts of wet snow--a symbolic day, I felt in my bones. A canopy
of fog dropped down on this new white city its burden of soot. And here
in front of me was Nicholas Van Suydam, snow slipping down his collar.
He rushed into speech. “I’m thankful I ran across you. I wanted to ask
if you know what plans Eva is making?”