"Up there," he said. "Ve're in the tube, you know."
She did not know, but she was too much ashamed of her rural ignorance further to discover it by unconsidered questions, and so full of a pulsing wonder at what was to come next, so full of the expectation of the child at her first melodrama that she had place for no backward thought. She sat silent until they had come out of the tunnel, climbed a windy stair, and emerged upon a thoroughfare as much ablaze as if all the stars of heaven had descended to light it, and as brimming with moving life as her father's mill at ten o'clock in the morning.
Max regarded the girl's open-eyed wonder.
"Now," he said, "ve'll chust chump in a taxi un' go get a good supper, un' then, vhile the vaiter's filling our order, I'll first do a little delephoning."
He put up his dark hand; a passing automobile, its tin flag raised, hummed up to the curb, and Mary, clinging timidly to the arm of her betrothed, began her first ride in a taxicab.
The street—it was Fourteenth Street, he told her—flared and seethed and spluttered before them. As if leaning over the head of a runaway horse, they shot in and out among clanging cable-cars, dashed by snorting vehicles of their own sort, and nearly grazed jostling cabs driven by cursing Jehus. Even at that late hour, some of the shops were still open, and the wide pavements on either side were black with countermarching processions of people, moving with the steady rapidity and stolidity of a swarm of ants. When the street ran by a tree-sprinkled square, its houses seemed to burst into still greater brightness to atone for the darkness of the park. Every second building was a restaurant, a theater for moving-pictures, or a saloon. Their electric-signs now winked from nothingness to light, now flashed forth a word, one letter at a time, and now were surrounded with wriggling snakes of fire.
It came upon her—this vision of the absolutely new, of the city's immensity and teeming life—at a moment when her heart was ready for reaction, when memory was prepared to reassert itself, and when, anger gone and regret poised like a runner at the starting-line, her quick determination might have failed her. But it came with stupefying force. The dream of pleasure gave place for the moment to a certainty of dread. Vaguely, unreasoningly, but with the unquestioning acceptance of a child, she felt New York as a terrible, solidified unity; as a vast, malevolent consciousness; as a living prison that implacably and resistlessly raised itself on every hand and on every hand shut her in forever.
She trembled and clung the tighter to her companion's arm, and her companion was alert to note her agitation.
"Vhat's the matter?" he inquired, in a voice that he well meant to be tender.
"I—I don't know," she began, her red underlip indrawn. "I—aren't we goin' pretty fast?"