He was already above the river. The sun was cold. The waters of the harbor cut out like sapphire fretted with gleam. Beyond, Brooklyn was in shadow--shadow that sprang rather from its nature than the sun’s lack. Quincy turned north where the great East Side crowded out under two bridges, stifling the river to an inlet. The city rose in a blue haze. Quincy recalled the words of the man in the Park: “Blue’s her color.” It was all like the piled ascent of some brobdingnagian ant-hill. He scrutinized it carefully,--from the stall-like wharves to the tower, turreted and carved in ice at the hill’s crest. It seemed ugly. And yet, as his eyes went back over the mazy whole, down from the notched skyline to the turmoiled streets that fell brown and grey into the water, it seemed beautiful as well. Quincy was puzzled. He did not know that in this flaunting grandeur, building from myriad misery and ugliness, lay the nature of New York. Quincy too was cold. Instinctively, he turned south. The sun was very ineffectual against the lower city with its escarpments of wrought stone. There was a cruelty about these that laughed at the falling sun. The tall buildings were ugly--fearfully so. They lacked grace and color. One of them was a titanic telescope done in cake and sugar. A huge structure farther north--ridiculous with a flounce as a flank and its tiny turrets--reminded him of building-blocks. And this brought to Quincy the idea of giant babies, sportively responsible for it all. But there was tragedy as well as farce. The vaster buildings rose all white and impervious and cool from the wallow of unlit mediocrity below. Monsters indeed, they seemed to have sucked the strength for rising from the nondescript ruck that they submerged. Ferocious, sapping prodigies they seemed, now, to Quincy--the sort to which men are sacrificed and that make slaves of their creators. All of this was like the blow of a mailed fist to the boy. It made him turn toward Brooklyn. The borough of homes appeared shabby and foul, a neglected step-sister unworthy the name of Cinderella. For here was no virtue under the spell of persecution. Brooklyn also was sinister enough. Merely, she had been less successful. Homes, evidently, counted little.