Being independent and alone in her own room, she could cry out her lone cry without any one interfering with unwelcome comforting. Then, pale-faced and red-eyed, she got up, the sobs still coming in little gasps. She looked in the glass as she pushed the black hair back from her blue-veined forehead. With one of those strange revelations of reality that come to people in life when in solitude they look at their own reflection in a mirror—she thought—spoke. "It is too late—too late—for me to be the mother of a boy-child."
Then she went and set her alarm-clock to a quarter to seven in the morning.
XVII
THE HOU-MEN OF THE DINGY CITY
How they call with different voices, these cities of men—from the Maxim-gun-like rattle of New York, with its chorus of strenuous steamers calling from the water, on over the gamut of different capitals to Tokio, where the city voice is the tinkling of stilted wooden shoes; not "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," but "Tinkle, tinkle, little feet," go the small wooden shoes on the wide firmament of pavement.
Most strident are the American cities; the most sweet-sounding are those of Japan, except in those few streets raided by tram-cars.
What is the voice of London? Is it not the plod, plod, dumping plod of the horses' hoofs and the jangling rattle of harness and bells, which last we hardly hear, so close is the sound to our ears, like things we cannot see because they are so close to our eyes? As it is a murmurous and noisy city in comparison with those of Japan, so it is peaceful and quiet in comparison with Chicago or New York. A friend of mine from that City of Unrest says that the sound of the London streets has a soothing, lulling effect on him, and makes him sleepy, like the sound of falling water.
As I went up to Euston to-day to meet an Oriental visitor, I fell to speculating how the city might look to him. A very cultured, intellectual fellow he is, who looks into the backs of the eyes of things. A Chinaman born, he had been through college in America, and knew American cities; he had also been studying in Paris, but this was his first visit to London. A wet, drizzling day was not the most propitious for his first impressions. Slopping along in a cab through the muddy streets, as I went under the portico of Euston Station I was forcefully reminded of one of the big gates of Pekin. There is a suggestion of the same massiveness; but the massiveness is only make-face, like the painted cannon on a Chinese city gate. It was an imposing portico to a shamble of sheds.
The railway terminus is the real gate of the modern city.
Yet what absurdly incongruous things these London city gates are—a salad jumble of architecture and machinery with a mayonnaise of train-oil and soot!