For a moment of glory, the city was bathed in a sanguine light. The sunset withdrew through the cross streets and left behind chasms spangled with lamps. But on the tops of the buildings, lingeringly, the ruddy light still frolicked; it might be the soul of New York playing with destruction, bantering ruin. This optimism sparkled on the towers, and glinted down towards the pavements and never reached the ground, and in the end, possibly, forgot that underneath the city there lay the earth itself. The land, foundation for this jubilance over the possibilities of man, might not exist. It was never seen. Before leaving for my temporary residence in France, I had said to Eva Litchfield that they were covering up the earth, and how, I asked, without the feel of the land under his feet could the New Yorker of the future write? She had replied, characteristically, that one could write with passion of England, for instance, if one came from Oshkosh where they make the trunks with the red bands around their middles. Intermittently, Eva liked New York. She had concluded her correction of my notion with the statement: “I’m frightened by nothing in the way of a town, a place. I’m only afraid of the things that men do to our spirits.” I decided to say to her, when I should see her: “It would be the right thing to hang one’s spirit so high that it can’t be reached: New York has the idea.” I would tell her about the soul of New York playing fitfully on the tops of the new tall buildings; and she would, of course, laugh at me as a dabbler in spiritualism. And Winnie Conant, with her aggravating tendency to manage the affairs of those few whom she liked--while she liked them: she would squawk with mirth and tell me to banish fear and adjust myself to grandeur. Winnie would say that some cities have souls, but that New York has strength for the struggle against the gods; her breath is vigour, her noise vitality, her every aspect that of superhuman effort; she is a lusty flout to the world, and often she taunts her own: who cares? Not those who are worthy of New York--would declare Winnie, who came here from Maine. I must have stayed out on the balcony for a long time--I had watched the sky darken and the lights of late workers prick in until each office building was a paper cut-out--and my excitement might have been the effect of the cold that had penetrated my heavy coat. The jingling of the telephone broke a spell. “Mrs. Underhill calling for Mrs. Avery, and she says will you please hurry as it’s very late?” came parrot-like from the hotel desk.