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By Root 5092 0

The noise of traffic has gotten louder and you wonder how people can live in this maelstrom: how can they stand it? A man duckfoots past you wearing a coat that seems to be made out of machine waste and you think how unacceptable such a coat would be in St. Botolphs. People would laugh. In the window of a tenement you see an old man in an undershirt eating something from a paper bag. He seems to be by-passed so pitilessly by life that you feel sad. Then, in crossing the street, you are nearly killed by a truck. Safe on the curb again you wonder about the pace of life in this big city. How do they keep it up? Everywhere you look you see signs of demolition and creation. The mind of the city seems divided about its purpose and its tastes. They are not only destroying good buildings; they are tearing up good streets; and the noise is so loud that if you should shout for help no one would hear you.

You walk. You smell cooking from a Spanish restaurant, new bread, beer slops, roasting coffee beans and the exhaust fumes of a bus. Gaping at a high building you walk straight into a fire hydrant and nearly knock yourself out. You look around, hoping that no one saw your mistake. No one seems to have cared. At the next crossing a young woman, waiting for the light to change, is singing a song about love. Her song can hardly be heard above the noise of traffic, but she doesn’t care. You have never seen a woman singing in the street before and she carries herself so well and seems so happy that you beam at her. The light changes and you miss your chance to cross the street because you are stopped in your tracks by a host of young women who are coming in the opposite direction. They must be going to work but they don’t look anything like the table-silver girls in St. Botolphs. Not a single one of them is under the charge of modesty that burdens the beauties in your New England home. Roses bloom in their cheeks, their hair falls in soft curls, pearls and diamonds sparkle at their wrists and throats and one of them—your head swims—has put a cloth rose into the rich darkness that divides her breasts. You cross the street and nearly get killed again.

You remember then that you must telephone Cousin Mildred who is going to get you a job in the carpet works but when you go into a drugstore you find that all the telephones have dials and you have never used one of these. You think of asking a stranger for help but this request would seem to expose—in a horrible way—your inexperience, your unfitness to live in the city, as if your beginnings in a small place were shameful. You overcome these fears and the stranger you approach is kind and helpful. On the strength of this small kindness the sun seems to shine and you are thrilled by a vision of the brotherhood of man. You call Cousin Mildred but a maid says that she is sleeping. The maid’s voice makes you wonder about the circumstances of your cousin’s life. You notice your rumpled flannel pants and step into a tailor shop to have them pressed. You wait in a humid little fitting room walled with mirrors, and, pantless, the figure you see is inescapably intimate and discouraging. Suppose the city should be bombed at this moment? The tailor hands in your trousers, warm and cozy with steam, and you go out again.

Now you are on a main avenue and you head, instinctively, for the north. You have never seen such crowds and such haste before. They are all late. They are all bent with purpose and the interior discourse that goes on behind their brows seems much more vehement than anything in St. Botolphs. It is so vehement that here and there it erupts into speech. Then ahead of you you see a girl carrying a hat box—a girl so fair, so lovely, so full of grace and yet frowning so deeply as if she doubted her beauty and her usefulness that you want to run after her and give her some money or at least some reassurance. The girl is lost in the crowd. Now you are passing, in the store windows, those generations of plaster ladies who have evolved a seasonal cycle of their own and who have posed at their