"Will you be at home to-morrow at eight?" he asked, still holding her hand.
She had an engagement to dine out, but it could be broken, she said. And with a puzzling resumption of coldness she rang for the Spauldings' footman, who ceremoniously showed her visitor to the door.
With a quickening heart he stepped down into the prim respectability of Seventy-second Street, and in one little hour life seemed to have grown more hopeful to him. For the first time, too, the streets of New York took on a home-like look to his alien eyes.
He walked eastward to the Park, where he caught a south-bound car. From the Circle he could see the long line of Eighth Avenue stretching out into the hazy distance. It lay before him indistinct and golden and misty, with the late afternoon sun slanting transformingly on its dust and smoke and commotion. There was a smell about it that seemed good. It stirred something dormant in him. It seemed like the dust of battle—like the drifting incense of man to all his gods of endeavor. Already a phantasmal shoulder seemed crowding and pushing him out into its untried turbulence.
Hartley decided that Repellier was right when he had said that this great city of the New World could wring out of a man all that was best in him. As he sped southward through the noise and the dust and the crowds, with his thoughts far into the future, he seemed to find some pleasing felicitousness in the very ambiguity of Repellier's phrase. But must the price of success, he asked himself, always be so great?
"Do you know," said Cordelia Vaughan musingly to the Spauldings that night as they drove down through the darkness of Riverside Park on their way home from dining at the Claremont—"do you know, I feel like work, hard work, once more?"