The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway
on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets,
gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden
atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty.
Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges
rose above the river mist like fairy towers suspended
between Heaven and earth. And again the sun
tipped the surrounding hills with gold, while the
city lay buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts
of river boats moved spectrally along.
Sometimes it was ugly, sometimes beautiful, but always
the city was powerful, significant, important.
It was a vast melting pot. Through its gates
came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers
and those who would destroy those dreams. From
all over the world there came men who sought a chance
to labor. They came in groups, anxious and dumb,
carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded
by men with cunning eyes.
Raw material, for the crucible of the city, as potentially
powerful as the iron ore which entered the city by
the same gate.
The city took them in, gave them sanctuary, and forgot
them. But the shepherds with the cunning eyes
remembered.
Lily Cardew, standing in the train shed one morning
early in March, watched such a line go by. She
watched it with interest. She had developed
a new interest in people during the year she had been
away. She had seen, in the army camp, similar
shuffling lines of men, transformed in a few hours
into ranks of uniformed soldiers, beginning already
to be actuated by the same motive. These aliens,
going by, would become citizens. Very soon now
they would appear on the streets in new American clothes
of extraordinary cut and color, their hair cut with
clippers almost to the crown, and surmounted by derby
hats always a size too small.
Lily smiled, and looked out for her mother.
She was suddenly unaccountably glad to be back again.
She liked the smoke and the noise, the movement,
the sense of things doing. And the sight of
her mother, small, faultlessly tailored, wearing a
great bunch of violets, and incongruous in that work-a-day
atmosphere, set her smiling again.
How familiar it all was! And heavens, how young
she looked! The limousine was at the curb, and
a footman as immaculately turned out as her mother
stood with a folded rug over his arm. On the
seat inside lay a purple box. Lily had known
it would be there. They would be ostensibly from
her father, because he had not been able to meet her,
but she knew quite well that Grace Cardew had stopped
at the florist’s on her way downtown and bought
them.
A little surge of affection for her mother warmed
the girl’s eyes. The small attentions which
in the Cardew household took the place of loving demonstrations
had always touched her. As a family the Cardews
were rather loosely knitted together, but there was
something very lovable about her mother.
