Your cautious God has paved his gate
With half a score of very strait
Expensive tablets, hewn in hate
And righteousness by Moses.
How decorus, how desolate,
The art—of Moses.”
As Rhoda drew breath for another verse, Edward noticed that his poem was the next in her sheaf.
And in that second or two of silence there was heard a curious growing clamor outside. It was like an impossibly metallic contact of wind against the window. For a minute everyone in the listening room had the insane feeling of experiencing something inexplicable. Then the leaping bestial yell of a fire engine approaching explained everything.
Mrs. Melsie Ponting was a smart woman. She was at the door first and, like drops from a rising mermaid, a trickle of small possessions was shaken from her as she ran; cigarettes, a lipstick, a matchbox, money, and the beads from a broken string.
“No hurry, no hurry...” shouted several men in laboriously indifferent voices, as the scraping chairs with one impulse shot, like splashing water, back from the central table. One man comforted many hearers by shouting jocosely, “Aw Gee, have a heart, you’re on my best corn....”