"It is curious how we are all taking pains to escape consequences to which we say we are indifferent. What matter is it if he does arrest me? I should at least have a cup of coffee at the station house."
On either side of the alley through which Fairfax now walked there was not a friendly door open, or a shutter flung back from a window. At the head of the street Fairfax stopped and looked back upon the yards and the tracks of the workshops. The ugly scene lay in the mist of very early morning and the increasing daylight made its crudeness each moment more apparent. As he stood alone in Nut Street, on either side of him hundreds of sleeping workmen, the sun rose over the yards, filling the dreary, unlovely outlook with a pure glory. To Fairfax's senses it brought no consolation but the sharp suffering that any beauty brings to the poet and the seer. It was a new day—he was too young to be crushed out of life because he had an empty pocket, and faint as he was, hungry as he was, the visions began to rise again in his brain. The crimson glory, as it swam over the railroad yards, over the bridge, over the unsightly buildings, was peopled by his ideals—his breath came fast and his heart beat. The clouds from which the sun emerged
took winged shapes and soared; the power of the iron creatures in the shed seemed to invigorate him. Fairfax drew a deep breath and murmured: "Art has made many victims. I won't sacrifice my life to it." And he seemed a coward to himself to be beaten so early in the race.
"Muscles of iron and a heart of steel," he murmured again, "a heart of steel."
He turned on his feet and limped on, and as he walked he saw a light in an opposite window with the early opening of a cheap restaurant. The shutters on either side of Nut Street were flung back. He heard the clattering of feet, doors were pushed open and the workers began to drift out into the day. Antony made for the light in the coffee house; it was extinguished before he arrived and the growing daylight took its place. A man from a lodging-house passed in at the restaurant door.
Fairfax's hands were deep in the pockets of his overcoat, his fingers touched a loose button. He turned it, but it did not feel like a button. He drew it out; it was twenty-five cents. He had not shaken out quite all the children's coins on the hall floor. This bit of silver had caught between the lining and the cloth and resisted his angry fling. As the young man looked at it, his face softened. He went into the eating-house with the other man and said to himself as he crossed the door-sill—
"Little cousin! you don't know what 'serious' money this is!"