From the dragon's teeth, the precipice broke in terraces and shelves hung with ash, sumach, and stunted oak. Wherever there was a hand's breadth of soil, a dandelion or a violet, a buttercup or a lady-fern, nestled in the keeping of the cliff as a bird's nest on a branch. Creepers and vines threw their tangles of tassels down to where the chimneys clustering along the river's brink blackened them with smoke. Small water-worn docks, sheltering nameless craft, battered, ancient, and grotesque, crept in and out among factories and coal yards, linking up with one another in a line of some twenty miles. Straight as the cut of a knife, the river clove its tremendous gash from Adirondacks to Atlantic—a leaden, shimmering, storied streak, too deep within its bed to catch the westering sunlight. The westering sunlight itself was silvered in the perpetual misty haze hanging over the island like an aureole, through which the city glimmered in mile after mile of gable and spire, of dome and cube, silent, suspended, heavenly.
There is nothing in the world like this cloud-built vision garlanded along the sky. No sound breaks from it, no sign of our earth-born life. The steel-blue-gray of a gull's wing swooping above the water is gross as compared with its texture. The violet and the lady-fern are not so delicate as the substance of its palaces. It might be dream; it might be mirage; it might be the city which came down from God as a bride adorned for her husband. Beginning too far away for the eye to reach, and ending where the gaze can no longer follow, it is immense and yet aërial, a towered, battlemented, mighty thing, yet spun of the ether between the worlds.
Though Jennie and her father had looked at this mystic wraith of a city so often that they hardly noticed it any more, they were never free from its ecstatic influence. That is, it moved them to aspirations without suggesting the objective to which they should aspire. Caught in the web of daily circumstance, entangled, enmeshed, helplessly captive amid hand-to-mouth necessities, their thoughts were rarely at liberty to wander from the definite calculation as to how to live. They didn't so wander even now. Even now, lifted up as they were among spiritual splendors, food, clothes, gas, taxes, and the mortgage were the things most heavily on their minds; but something else stirred in them with a sluggish will to live.
"Jennie, do you believe in God?"
For a minute Jennie gazed sidewise at the celestial city in the air and made no answer. Josiah himself hardly knew why he had asked the question unless it was because of vague new fears as to Jennie's associations. Of these he knew almost as little as the parent bird of its offspring's doings when the young have taken flight. This was the custom of the family, the custom of the country. But he had never been free from misgivings that Jennie's calling of artist's model was "not respectable," and now this mention of a hundred dollars, even though it were but in jest, roused some little-used sense of paternal responsibility.
"I don't know that I do," Jennie said, at last. She added, after another minute's thought, "What's the good of God, anyhow?"
"People say he can take you to heaven when you die, or send you to the other place."
"I'm not worrying about what will happen when I die; I've got all I can attend to here. Can God help me about that?"
It was the test question of Josiah's inner life. His faith stood or fell by it. He would have been glad to tell his child that she could be aided in her earthly problems, but, unlike Job, hadn't he himself served God for naught?
"He don't seem able to do that, my dear," he sighed, as if the confession of unbelief forced its way out in spite of himself.