As I had nowhere to go in particular, I strolled slowly up the street, and then walked back again. And as I neared the church, I met the rector who had just left his robing-room. He was a fine-looking man on the street as well as in the chancel, and I was prompted to speak to him, and say that I had just heard him preach. He was, however, too impatient at my accosting him and so manifestly suspicious that I quickly regretted my impulse. His, "Well, what is it?" was so prompt on his lips and his suspicion of me was so clear in his cold, bluish eyes, that I drew myself up and replied: "Oh! nothing. I was only going to say that I had just heard you preach--that's all." "Oh! Ah! Well, I'm much obliged. I'm very glad if I've helped you." He pulled out his watch. "Helped me! You haven't," I said dryly and turned away. A quarter of an hour later, as I strolled along the street lonely and forlorn, I saw him hurrying up the steps of the large house which had been pointed out to me as Mrs. Argand's, the great philanthropist. XVII THE GULF As I saw more of the city, its vastness, its might and its inhumanity grew on me. It was a world in itself, a world constructed on lines as different from that in which I had lived as if it had been Mars; a city as different from the smaller cities I had known as if it had been Babylon or Nineveh. The contrasts were as great as they could have been in the capitals Sardanapalus built--structures so vast that they must have dwarfed the towers of Sardis--so rich and splendid that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon must have been outshone--reared their stupendous bulk into the smoky air and cast into perpetual shade all that lay near them. Hard beside their towering mass lay a region filled with the wretched tenements of the poor, and a little further off the houses of the well-to-do. And there was not a greater contrast between the vastness of the one and the pitiful squalor of the other than between the life of the owners of the former and that of the denizens of the closely packed tenements which dwindled in their shadow. Splendor and squalor were divided often only by a brick wall. The roar of the tide that swept through the teeming streets drowned the cry of wretchedness, and only the wretched knew how loud it was. I had never seen such wealth, and I had never dreamed of such poverty. The vulgar make the parade; the refined pass so quietly as scarcely to be observed. The vulgarity of the display of riches began to oppress me. I discovered later the great store of refinement, goodness and sweetness that was hidden in the homes alike of an element of the wealthy, the merely well-to-do and the poor. But for a time it was all eclipsed by the glare of the vulgar and irresponsible rich. Arrogance, discontent, hardness, vulgarity, were stamped in many faces, and spoke in every movement of many of those I saw, even of the most richly dressed.