Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images at The Internet Archive) Phases of an Inferior Planet _By_ ELLEN GLASGOW _Author of "The Descendant"_ [Illustration] HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1898 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE DESCENDANT. A Novel. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25. The writer has a sure touch, a firm and philosophically consistent hold upon his theme, much delicacy of perception, and a sane sense of humor. The style, if not of the fastidiously fine school, is fluent and often brilliant. ... The character drawing is vivid and realistic.--_Boston Transcript._ The characters here are skilfully drawn, and the drama in which they take part is unusually novel and impressive. ... The work of an author who has not written at random, but who has woven into a strong story some of the cardinal truths of modern science.--_N. Y. Herald._ NEW YORK AND LONDON: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS. Copyright, 1898, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved._ TO CARY McC. _"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."_ Phase First _"Some turned to folly and the sweet works of the flesh."_ --Hymn to Zeus. CHAPTER I Along Broadway at six o'clock a throng of pedestrians was stepping northward. A grayish day was settling into a gray evening, and a negative lack of color and elasticity had matured into a positive condition of atmospheric flatness. The air exhaled a limp and insipid moisture, like that given forth by a sponge newly steeped in an anaesthetic. Upon the sombre fretwork of leafless trees, bare against red-brick buildings, drops of water hung trembling, though as yet there had been no rainfall, and the straggling tufts of grass in the city parks drooped earthward like the damp and uncurled fringe of a woman's hair. Spanning the remote west as a rainbow stretched an unfulfilled pledge of better things, for beyond the smoke-begrimed battalion of tenement chimney-pots a faint streak of mauve defined the line of the horizon--an ineffectual and transparent sheet of rose-tinted vapor, through which the indomitable neutrality of background was revealed. The city swam in a sea of mist, and the electric lights, coming slowly into being, must have seemed to a far-off observer a galaxy of wandering stars that had burst the woof of heaven and fallen from their allotted spheres to be caught like blossoms in the white obscurity of fog. Above them their deserted habitation frowned blackly down with closed doors and impenetrable walls.