"Might not he be disinterested, for once?"
"Not O'Connor," said Smith, dryly. "But good heavens! haven't we talked intrigues and cabals and plots long enough? There are one or two other things in life, you know—I've hardly given you a chance to speak, and I've been holding forth like an unsuccessful detective reporting to his superior officer."
And the conversation drifted into other channels.
A great city is a wonderful place in a thousand ways, not the least of which is its magical influence upon human relationships. Perhaps its mere size, the multiplicity of its sights and sounds, its effect of isolating an individual in the midst of an almost impenetrable throng—perhaps these things are chiefly responsible. But it is certain that, in common with the desert and the sea, a city like London or Paris or New York carries in its very atmosphere a sense of almost devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. In the very shrine of the unreal and the artificial, reality grips with a power elsewhere unknown. Beyond all the curious striving for the immaterial, the sense of the utter futility of that very effort becomes wholly clear. Follies and affectations may be sought with added fervor for the mind and the body, but the want of them is stilled in the soul.
Since this is so, in the very home of conventions and conventionalities these artificial ideas become more palpably ridiculous. Surrounded by needless man-made fetters, one sees them to be inane. The wind that blows between the worlds blows in the world's great cities, and it blows, for their lovers at least, the cobwebs from the heart. What is natural is seen to be right, and what is real is seen to be true.
To Smith, lover of his city as he was, these truths were peculiarly obvious; and to Helen Maitland, seeing them largely from the angle of Smith's vision, they became the truth no less. She remembered with some surprise her quite recent dislike of New York, and her even more recent chill of distaste and dread, when she came from the Park, which had checked for the moment the liking she felt springing to life. Of course it was loneliness; but here was a man who had told her that New York's loneliness was one of its greatest charms, and who regarded the apparent heartlessness of the city as one of its most inspiring tonics. Somehow, and apparently most naturally, she found it was coming to seem so to her.
If a man wishes to interest a woman, he does well to speak to her of his enthusiasms; and if he desires to alienate her interest, he will do well to forget them. Smith, who cared deeply for New York, and who was moving unconsciously along the sunny way that led to Helen Maitland, found that never two enthusiasms welded so readily as these. Part of this, no doubt, was due to the city's own influence, but probably the greater part was due to his own genuine understanding and affection for the town itself.
And Helen had not been the readiest of converts, for in the first place, coming as she did from Boston, her sympathies were not with the larger city. She had found its confusion rather tiresome, its contrasts perhaps a little crude, its poverty somewhat distressing, and its wealth a trifle vulgar. With Smith, a new viewpoint was hers, and her old conceptions, which now seemed hopelessly provincial, melted like mist before the sun.
Smith knew his city as a maestro knows his instrument, and their voyages together were like incursions into an enchanted space where time was not. He seemed to know exactly what had been in every nook and corner of the town at every period of its career. Once they stood on Broadway near Columbia University, on whose granite wall was fixed the plate which told of Washington's muster upon those very heights; and Smith had built up for her, not as an historian, but as an actor in the drama, the picture before her eyes. He showed her the old Jumel Mansion farther up town, and they went back together a century and a half to all the strange sights those old halls had seen.
Perhaps the softest spot in Smith's sympathies was held by the Knickerbockers—those sturdy old citizens who seemed all of them somehow to have taken something of the mold of their redoubtable leader and the greatest of them all, Peter Stuyvesant. Smith was familiar with them all, from Peter down. And old Minuit, the Indian, selling his island for a song, was so much a matter of reality to Smith that Helen came to believe in him also as a real individual.