The hammering monotony of huge buildings that were neither beautiful to look upon nor useful to be dwelt in--monuments of vanity and folly, hideous with stolen decoration no one understood, or lavished with detail, intricate, costly, stupid that no one ever saw, sheathed in insincerities whose one successful purpose was to hide the structures,--and these, twice as tall as conditions warranted, built with money that was needed--sorely needed--elsewhere; the fetid subways, packed with humanity as no humane company would pack a poultry car, cesspools that stunk in summer and were a stain upon the community that used them, always; the crass, nasty, lying theaters of Broadway, expressive of a mudworm’s aspirations; the spiritless cafés that interspersed them, ruled and erected to glorify the souls of lackeys, serving bad food no one would eat elsewhere at the expense of entertainments no one would sit through elsewhere: the unending blight of magazines and journals--made from the crushing of fair forests into wood-pulp!--one built upon the sweaty, fatuous dimensions of a traveling salesman, one leveled at the rouged, frilled creature that lazes in a cheap flat, mothers a puppy and dreams of motors, a third aimed to titillate the woman with less sex, more children, a wider hallway but no more brains--littered all and innumerably, with false optimism, false advice, false pictures and false plots: the blatancy of the ensemble--its utter uselessness--journals screaming above the houses, traffic screaming above the public halls, clubs glittering above the shops, theaters and restaurants exhibiting above the brothels--all of it shutting out the blue of heaven, the glance of the sun on the Hudson, the murmur of the few surviving trees, the spirit of the few surviving souls. And the mad misery of the dwellers!--proud to be smothered in the biggest subway, proud to be cheated in the biggest stores, proud to be lied to by the biggest journals, proud to be sheep in the biggest pen!... But all this was behind Quincy. All this was behind him, as is the surface when a man has burrowed deep. All this was. But it was unimportant. And none of it would be, if each man so burrowed beneath it to the poisoned ego of which all of it, in cumulation, was a putrescent outer deposit. It interested Quincy no longer. He had no time to dwell on it, or to inveigh against it. He was engaged upon himself. Here was a new sort of serenity--the sort that accepts a certain thing as an economy of strength for fighting elsewhere; the economy, not of blinking the truth, but of indifference to superficial falsehood. This is the economy of the artist toward what is evil, and of the priest toward what is contradictory to his faith. Quincy applied it to what had so far engrossed and maddened him. Dwelling upon the City’s faults--by feeling them, combatting them--he had no time or muscle for himself. Now, he plowed deeper.