I waited for her: one always waited for her: and eventually I forgot that I expected her. It took a great deal to erase Molly Underhill from a nervous woman’s consciousness. In this case, the great deal was the voice of the streets, which might be bellowing a threat to the creature leaning from a balcony thirty storeys above the sidewalk. The creature chid herself: “What business of yours is the growth of New York? You’re a small-sized widow-woman who had deliberately come back: now put up with it.” I had informed Florence Quincy’s guests that I had come back to discover what my friends were doing, who they were doing up brown, and what they would do to me. That they were briskly up to something I did not doubt; New York lends a spurious energy to those who stay long enough and not too long. We had rushed in from all sections of the country, to conquer the metropolis if it did not kill us first. It was growing faster than were we. Gazing at a sky-line still largely composed of the bare steel ribs of buildings that tomorrow would be completed, this newest New York seemed, suddenly and devastatingly, an entity too powerful to cope with. My head swam from the immensity of this conception of a city. Here were buildings striving titanically to reach the skies, and a people battling to preserve an individuality already dwarfed by their own vast feats of masonry; and this mass of the structures erected by themselves was so mighty, this monster born of their ambition was so ruthless in its demands that they keep up with it, that these constructive pigmies would be terrified if the hurry of their existence did not sweep them irresistibly on. Seen from the height where I clung bewildered, they crawled like insects through the streets. The confused roar of their activities, and of the machinery set in motion by their intelligence, came up to me in a paean of praise of themselves. But these people who, thus defeated by their fate, rushed madly along the sidewalks, these poor things who, believing they held their heads proudly, lived their apology to the buildings that they themselves achieved, these victims maddened by their selected careers: even these beings might occasionally pause and listen to a silence. For at intervals there fell upon the dreadful bellow of the traffic a hush so profound that it was as if the hand of God had lifted in warning. No need for me to remind myself that I was being melodramatic. I was frightened. Noise, to me, has always seemed a personal threat. My nerves rasped by the roar, my thoughts confused by the silences falling with the change of traffic lights, I would not have been surprised if on the now flaming sky the finger of doom had written. Against which of us would the finger trace its denunciation? I qualified my self-arraignment: I was becoming absurd. We could only be hurt by people and, mainly, by ourselves.