"Kiss me, Cottie."
"Della—Della!"
"My little sister!"
"You're goin', Della—try to think, darlin', what it means—you're goin'."
"'Sh-h-h, dearie—'sh-h-h. Yes—I—I'm goin'."
And in the room adjoining John Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head.
The city has a thousand throats, its voice is like a storm running on the wind, and like ship-high waves plunging on ship-high rocks, and like unto the undertone of lost souls adrift in a sheol of fog and water.
The voice of the city knows none of the acoustic limitations of architects and prima donnas. Its dome is as high as fifty-story sky-scrapers, and its sounding-board the bases of a thousand thousand tired brains.
It penetrates the Persian-velvet hangings of the most rococo palace toward which the sight-seeing automobile points its megaphone, and beats against brains neurotic with the problems of solid-gold-edged bonds and solid-gold cotillion favors. It is the birth-song of the tenement child and the swan-song of the weak. It travels out over fields of new-mown hay and sings to the boy at the plow. It shouts to the victor and whispers to the stranger.