From an unseen steeple or two chimes sounded the hour. Farther away in the city a bell answered. It is not a city of belfries and chimes; only locally and
by hazard are bell notes distinguishable above the interminable rolling monotone of the streets.
And now, the haze thickening, distant reverberations, deep, mellow, melancholy, grew in the night air: fog horns from the two rivers and the bay.
Leaning both elbows on the sill of the opened window Athalie gazed wearily into the street where noisy children shrilled at one another and dodged vehicles like those quick tiny creatures whirling on ponds.
Here and there, the flare of petroleum torches lighted push-carts piled with fruit or laden with bowls of lemonade and hokey-pokey. Sidewalks were crowded with shabby people gossiping in groups or passing east and west—about what squalid business only they could know.
On the stoops of all the dwellings, brick or brownstone, people sat; the men in shirt-sleeves, the young girls bare-headed, and in light summer gowns. Pianos sounded through open parlour windows; there was dancing going on somewhere in the block.
Eastward where the street intersected the glare of the dingy avenue, a policeman stood on fixed post, the electric lights guttering on his metal-work when he turned. Athalie had laid her cheek on her arms and closed her eyes, from fatigue, perhaps; perhaps to force back the tears which, nevertheless, glimmered on her lashes where they lay close to the curved white cheeks.
Little by little the girl was taking degree after degree in her post-graduate course, the study of which was man.
And for the first time in her life a new reaction in the laboratory of experience had revealed to her a new element in her analysis; bitterness.