Because she knew this to be true, she paid no attention. She said that he would come into the house quietly, tiptoeing upstairs to his dusty workroom; he must get to his drawing-table and sketch the vision that shone, bright as day, in his head. Even the shining sight of Eva might injure the delicate fabric of the as yet disembodied image. He would feel sure, she said, that when the dark pressed on his windowpanes he would see it as he had seen it in the first flush of his enthusiasm. “I fixed up a workroom for him,” she explained. “And I let him keep it as grimy with charcoal dust as he wishes. He’s comfortably slouchy, and agreeably smutty, and this should please him, I’m sure. I don’t think men care how they look when they work: as I do, and as I’m sure you do.” She gave this a moment’s thought, and continued: “But he breaks in on me when I’m working.” “Do you break in on him when he’s working?” She began to laugh at what she described as herself smudged with charcoal from the injudicious embraces of her husband. “We’ve had some queer love-making in that horribly ugly room.” She recalled one day in particular when from his ravings, as she described it, she had pieced together the tale of his experience; and, telling it to me, she fitted these fragments into a story. How much of this was Nicholas, and how much Eva, she herself could not have made out when she had finished; but I suspected that in the end she would believe that it was all hers. He had run down the steps of the Elevated station and emerged, with the permanence of the solid flat ground again under his feet, on the twisted line of Sixth Avenue. Although he had got off the train high in the air at Eighth Street, he now found himself at Tenth, in front of the Jefferson Market Police Court; for this is one of the spots whereon Greenwich Village thumbs a derisive nose at the regularity of geometric New York. He gave it no heed; he was used to it. He hurried because he wished to reach home in as short a time as possible, and not because Sixth Avenue smelled of butchers and grocers, of cobblers, and of frying chops in all-night restaurants. His head was ecstatically full of the thing that had occurred to him on the ride downtown from his office. Staring in at, without seeing, the flying intimacies of second storey life in squalid tenements along the way, he had seen in his imagination the stateliest of pleasure domes. How to set-back a tower and keep it from looking like an after-thought: this had been holding up the design on which he had worked all week. It must go in a mass, solidly from the ground--the fundamental earth. Suitably, there should be no springing up, lacy like the Giralda Tower, in this city which grew around him, piling above him, unlike anything the world had seen before. There must be no more erections resembling factory chimneys, stuck for utility on top of square structures no better than a child might build with blocks. The city! What it would be, to