CHAPTER II
THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY
All clad in mail he rode for Christ,
And his strait pathway trod;
Nor scorned he to be sacrificed
For his most jealous God.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
Our Manhattans of the mind always have their Boweries of the blood.—"The Silver Poppy."
"Wonderful, isn't it?" cried Hartley, leaning out of the wide-silled studio window where Repellier sat smoking wearily. He sniffed eagerly at the warm night air, with its mingled odors of asphalt and dust and cooling masonry.
The last of the evening's guests were gone. Hartley had been only too glad to linger on for a while with Repellier alone, seizing as an excuse the chance for one last look at his Motherhood picture, which was to be carried off to Paris by the next steamer. It was a canvas in the artist's newest style, a Hester Street mother suckling her child in the dusk of a little shaded doorstep, brooding there grave-eyed, deep-bosomed, and calm-souled, while the turgid life of the slums flowed back and forth about her, unfelt, unthought of, unseen.
Now they both looked down in silence to where the city lay beneath them, a garden of glimmering lights—pearl and opal and amethyst, with a flickering ruby or two in the remoter velvety blackness.