For Mona the singer presently became an obsession. She concealed her feelings concerning the palpable defection of Ulick. She was as cordial as ever in her conduct toward him, but she no longer spoke of their dream-children. Grane and Shamus had died the swift death of all poetic conceptions confronted by harsh reality. Her love for him seemed diverted to Easter. As the lustre of an electric lamp attracts the night-moth so the glittering personality and fame of the prima-donna drew within its warm zone the feebler will of Mona. The two girls became close companions. With growing disquietude Ulick noticed this; but he was powerless. He had kept to himself his early adventure with Easter. And Easter had never heard from him a hint of his relations with Mona. Yet he was certain that if she didn't precisely know the facts she surmised them. She would fix her brilliant eyes on the girl and Mona, blushing, would hang her head. How much did Easter know? How much had Alfred told her? He was a gossip, a tattler of mean tales, an amateur in the art of scandalous insinuation. Nevertheless, the others were pleased when he appeared. He saw more clearly than any of them, and he had the disagreeable gift of telling truths. It was a wonder he maintained his unpopularity. ... One sunny afternoon in midwinter they went to the old Vienna Café next to Grace Church to drink coffee and chatter about eternity and the town-pump. It was Alfred's beloved stamping-ground. The white suavities of Grace Church, the twist of the street where Broadway debouches into Union Square, aroused in him the fancy that in no other spot of the planet is the tempo of living faster, or any place where the human pulse beats more quickly. The tumults and alarums of the day are more exciting than a Cycle in Cathay. Vitality is at its hottest. We are like a colony of ants disturbed by a stranger, he ruminated. We are caught in eddies and whirlpools; and on the edges of foaming breakers we are dumped upon densely populated sands. Childe Roland, if he came to New York, would not be heard, so many other knights are blowing their horns; besides, he might be puzzled to find his eagerly sought-for Dark Tower. Our surfaces are hard, boastful, the rhythms of our daily life abrupt, over-emphatic. There are few timid backwaters left for sensitive folk who dislike the glare and rumble of modern traffic. We appear to be making some unknown goal, as in the streets we seem to be running to a fire or a fight that we never reach. Alternately hypnotic and repellant, New York is often a more stony-hearted step-mother than the Oxford street of De Quincey. Alfred admitted to himself that our city would not be considered beautiful in the old order of aesthetics. Its specific beauty savours of the monstrous. The scale is epical. Too many buildings are glorified chimneys. But what a picture of titanic energy, of cyclopean ambition! Look over Manhattan from Washington Heights. The wilderness of flat