And at this moment, through a gap in the throng which had again turned delirious, we saw Eva’s little mouth going--going; and someone with a pale face came up and said that Nicholas must get Eva home before she should have a breakdown. I heard Nicholas mutter that this would be a good chance to hit Mapes with a beer bottle, and saw that the man with the pale face was he. But Mapes at once faded into the mass of people, and Eva, her cheeks wet with tears, waited for him. But I thought that she waited for anyone who would help her. People were crowding, but I got the impression that they did not attend Eva. It was a man around whom they clustered, necks stretching to see over each other’s shoulders. His pleasant face dead white, his gentle eyes glassy, his plump form on the verge of collapse, this young man, Freye Remsen, felt no ground under his feet. He who had talked to every desperately threatening artist in New York--he who had believed these people to be the great tragic characters of the century--had now looked on the face of death by self-inflicted violence, and everything he believed had been at once reversed. He babbled: “I was going to bring Molly here tonight--and her apartment was filled with the police and they held me up and pushed me out. I was going to bring her here tonight. The place was full of policemen.” Pentreath stepped down from his vermilion throne. He reared up like a primeval statue. He bellowed: “Well? Ain’t that what we’ll all come to? Ain’t we all mad as coots?” [Illustration] III On every street corner men and women offered for sale apples which the passersby were too shocked to buy. Every living thing in the city was in a state of shock. They cried with their eyes and with their pale cheeks: “That this could have happened to New York!” If the fantastic beauty of the panorama still gave them pleasure, it was now a thwarted, masochistic pleasure. Up it went, the city, striving to pierce the sky itself; defying the gods whilst trusting to the law of gravity of the earth, inarticulately but consciously lampooning the great buried cities of the past whilst through its streets swept the old, old misery of money fear. I went out on my balcony and looked, awe-stricken in spite of habit, into the gnashing teeth of the sky-line. But there is something unsettling in this sky-line; it cannot induce inertia. I dressed and went down into the street, wandering aimlessly and with my head filled with what I had endured the day before. The weather was abominable, with gusts of wet snow--a symbolic day, I felt in my bones. A canopy of fog dropped down on this new white city its burden of soot. And here in front of me was Nicholas Van Suydam, snow slipping down his collar. He rushed into speech. “I’m thankful I ran across you. I wanted to ask if you know what plans Eva is making?” I scoffed: “That has a familiar ring!”