The last of the evening's guests were gone. Hartley had been only too glad to linger on for a while with Repellier alone, seizing as an excuse the chance for one last look at his Motherhood picture, which was to be carried off to Paris by the next steamer. It was a canvas in the artist's newest style, a Hester Street mother suckling her child in the dusk of a little shaded doorstep, brooding there grave-eyed, deep-bosomed, and calm-souled, while the turgid life of the slums flowed back and forth about her, unfelt, unthought of, unseen. Now they both looked down in silence to where the city lay beneath them, a garden of glimmering lights--pearl and opal and amethyst, with a flickering ruby or two in the remoter velvety blackness. "Yes," said the older man, "it _is_ wonderful." "And what a place you have here to work! Where one can be alone, and yet dip into life, just as one would dip one's wrist into a stream." The dull sounds of the midnight streets, broken, as they looked, by the sharp clanging of an ambulance bell, the rumbling of car-wheels mingled with the rattle of a pavement sweeper and the intermittent patter of hoofs on the asphalt came up faintly through the odorous, calm air. There was a mysterious charm about the great, incongruous, huddled city, picturesque in its very defiance of symmetry and beauty. "That's Broadway, isn't it," said Hartley, pointing with his finger, "still looking like a Milky Way of lights?" "Yes; and those glowing crowns of light are the roof-gardens; and there's Fifth Avenue, spangled with its twin rows of white electric globes, for all the world like a double thread of pearls hanging down the breast of the city. Those crawling snakes with the golden scales are the L trains. That cobweb of light is Brooklyn Bridge, and those little ruby fireflies are the ferries on the North River." "And that crown of old gold and rose stands over Brooklyn, I know, and the lower bay." An unknown city had always held vague terrors for Hartley; once, even, as a child, he had burst into sudden tears over an old atlas of the world; "it was so big and lonesome," he had tried to tell his uncomprehending nurse. But now, as he followed Repellier's finger with his eyes, he was dimly conscious of that sense of fugitive terror lifting and drifting away from the sea of scattered lights beneath him. For a moment he felt more drawn toward the city than of old, though his first vivid, photographic impression of it floated mockingly back through his mind.