Passing through the great concourse of the station I entered a subterranean passage, and, on again coming to the surface of the earth, found myself near the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Halting I gazed around in surprise. A dream city stretched around me—the city whose dimly realized beauty we all cherish in the depth of our soul. The wide avenue, the buildings, every object in sight, even space itself, was done in soft, luminous grays. There was not a sound—no clang of surface-car, no honk of automobile, no rumble of elevated, no muffled growl of subway, not even the pad of a horse’s hoofs on the velvet asphalt. I was alone in the heart of a great sleeping city—wonderful, mysterious, superb! The realization of the marvellous beauty of the scene was so unexpected and acute that it hurt. In the pain there was an exaltation that lifted me above the problems of every-day life. Struggling to realize myself as Polly Preston I called to mind the lone five-dollar bill in my purse. Then I sternly reminded myself that my only other worldly possession was the scanty change of underwear folded about my tooth-brush and dressing-comb in the pockets of my coat. Contemplation of my poverty failing to lessen my enjoyment of my surroundings, I focussed my thoughts on my people—my sisters and my brothers and my cousins. How they would shake their heads could they know of my wandering around New York at night and alone! “Thank God!” I heard them exclaim in chorus, “your dear mother didn’t live to see it.” Instead of being overwhelmed by a feeling of forlorn loneliness I felt myself grin. Not even one small pang for setting at naught the conventions of my class! A longing to stop the clock possessed me, to hold back dawn, to keep the people asleep, that I, like a disembodied spirit, might wander over the city and drink my fill of its enchanted loveliness. With this wish filling my mind I stood staring along Fifth Avenue—down in the dusk toward Washington Square, up, up between the tall buildings that seemed almost a tunnel, to the faint luminousness which I knew marked the beginning of Central Park. Yet, excited as my imagination was, it did not warn me that the adventure begun so carelessly would extend over four years instead of a few weeks—and those four years the most eventful in all history—that the war then going on between a few nations in Europe would convulse the world and threaten the very foundations of civilization. No premonition whispered to me of the host of khaki-clad young men whose tramp, tramp, tramp along the wide avenue would be echoed in millions of breaking hearts throughout the length and breadth of our country. Nor of the return march of those same boys—yet were they the same?—in battle-marred uniforms whose faces, though alight with the joys of home-coming and the conscious knowledge that their strength had put an end to the world nightmare, seemed strangely old and still.