Evenings, six-dollar-a-week salesgirls sit in their five-dollar-a-week hall-bedrooms, with their aching feet in a tub of hot water and their aching fingers busy with baby-ribboned coat-hangers and silk needle-book tokens of Yuletide affection.
Even as it flowered in a manger the Christmas spirit, a perennial lily upon the sooty face of the world, blooms out of the slack heap of men's rife and strife.
In the hearts of children it is a pod filled with their first happiness.
Down from a sky the color of cold dish-water a cloak of swift snow fell upon the city, muffling its voice like a hand held against its mouth. Children who had never before beheld a white Christmas leaped with the joy of it. A sudden army of men with blue faces and no overcoats sprang full-grown and armed with shovels, from out the storm. City parks lay etched in sudden finery. Men coming up out of the cañon of Wall Street remembered that it was Christmas and felt for bauble money.
At early dusk and through the white dance of the white storm the city slid its four million packs off its four million backs and turned homeward. Pedestrians with the shopper's light in their eyes bent into the flurry and darted for surface cars and subways. Commuters, laden with bundles and with tickets between their teeth, rushed for early trains.
Women with bearing-down bundles and babies wedged through the crowd, fighting for trains and place. Boys in cadet uniforms and boarding-school girls, homeward bound, thrust forward their shining faces as if into the to-morrow. A tight tangle of business men passed single file through a trellised gateway and on down to a lower level. A messenger with a tipsy spray of holly stuck upright in his cap whacked with a folded newspaper at a fellow-messenger's swift legs and darted in and around the knees of the crowd. A prodigal hesitated, then bought a second-class ticket for home. Two nuns hurried softly on missions of Christmas.
The low thunder of a thousand feet: tired feet, eager feet; flat feet; shabby feet; young feet; callous feet; arched and archless feet. Voices that rose like wind to a gale. A child dragged by the arm and whimpering. A group of shawled strangers interchanging sharp jargon.
Within the marble mausoleum of a waiting-room, its benches lined with the kaleidoscopic faces of the traveling public, a train-announcer bellowed a paean of tracks and stations.
At the onyx-and-nickel-plated periodical stand men in passing snatched their evening paper from off the stack of the counter, flopping down their pennies as they ran. In the glow of a spray of red and white electric bulbs, in a bower of the instant's pretty-girl periodical covers, and herself the most vivid of them all, Miss Marjorie Clark caught a hastily flung copper coin on the fly, her laughter mounting with it.
"Whoops, la-la!"