Your gates are stark and beautiful As are the brows of Mary. Your golden bolt is light to pull And yet my feet are wary. Between a sword and another sword I see the garden of the Lord And young saints treading in accord A path that may not vary. A million saints in a marching horde But never—a fairy. There stand the trees defensive. There Your cautious God encloses In a siege of lancéd lavender Dark fortresses of roses. Your cautious God has paved his gate With half a score of very strait Expensive tablets, hewn in hate And righteousness by Moses. How decorus, how desolate, The art—of Moses.” As Rhoda drew breath for another verse, Edward noticed that his poem was the next in her sheaf. And in that second or two of silence there was heard a curious growing clamor outside. It was like an impossibly metallic contact of wind against the window. For a minute everyone in the listening room had the insane feeling of experiencing something inexplicable. Then the leaping bestial yell of a fire engine approaching explained everything. Mrs. Melsie Ponting was a smart woman. She was at the door first and, like drops from a rising mermaid, a trickle of small possessions was shaken from her as she ran; cigarettes, a lipstick, a matchbox, money, and the beads from a broken string. “No hurry, no hurry...” shouted several men in laboriously indifferent voices, as the scraping chairs with one impulse shot, like splashing water, back from the central table. One man comforted many hearers by shouting jocosely, “Aw Gee, have a heart, you’re on my best corn....” Edward thought he would save Emily. “Our hero’s first thought in danger was for his beloved....” Emily was dancing about. “Oo, Edward, what a party!” She was sparkling with the pride which one feels on finding oneself present at an event. She was determined to save her hat and threw away blithely several hats which had alighted upon it. They all arrived on the street, ashamed to have been so tense in their efforts to reach it. The fire was in a house behind the restaurant. The fire engines were on another street, but a few firemen were keeping a space clear of onlookers on the vacant lots close by. The burning house had its back to them; it was looking away from them towards the bay like one in agony turning away to bite his lips. Like a tongue the smoke hung out of one window and sparks streamed down the smoke. There was a shaking glow on the other side of the house which lighted up the low bending sky. An inverted cone of smoke spun on the roof like a top. Edward felt somehow that the whole scene was upside down, that the sky was his vantage point, and the blowing fire like a flower of the sky. The cold and usual lights of fireless virgin cities round the bay looked incredibly stupid.