There was neither sign nor token, in the faces of the citied throng that brushed past him, to show that any of life’s more tumultuous emotions and movements had touched their lives. It was only as he passed a newsboy with his armful of flaring headlines, and a uniformed officer, suggestive of the motley harvest of a morning police court, that once more he fully realized how life still held its tumult and romance, though it was the order of modern existence that such things should be hidden and subterranean. It was only now and then, Durkin told himself, through some sudden little explosion in the press, or through the steaming manhole of the city magistrate’s court, that these turgid and often undreamed of sewers showed themselves. . . . After all, he maintained to himself, life had not so greatly altered. CHAPTER XXVI Durkin’s first feeling, incongruously enough, once he was out in the open air, was a ravenous sense of hunger. Through all that busy day his only meal had been a hasty and half-eaten breakfast. His second thought was at once both to submerge and sustain himself in one of those Broadway basement restaurants where men perch on seats and gulp down meals over a seat-fringed counter. Then he thought of Frances, of her anxiety, of her long waiting, and he tried to tell himself, valiantly enough, that another hour would make little difference, and that they would take their dinner in state and at their ease, at the Beaux-Arts, or at the Ritz, or perhaps even at the St. Regis. The thought of her gave a sudden, warm glow to the gray flatness of life, born of his hunger and weariness. He pictured her, framed in the gloom of the open doorway, in answer to his knock, the slender oval of her face touched with weariness, her shadowy, brooding, violet eyes grown suddenly alert, even her two warm, woman’s arms open, like a very nest, to receive and hold him, and her motherly young shoulder to shield him. He laughed to himself as he remembered the time that he had described her as the victim of an “ingrowing maternal instinct”—she had always seemed so ready to nurture and guard and cherish. She was a woman, he said to himself—with a sudden, strange foreboding of he knew not what—who ought to have had children. She was one of those deeper and richer natures, he knew, who would always love Love more than she could love men. “What is electricity?” he had asked her one quiet night, touched into wonder for the familiar miracle, as they bent together over their relay, while an operator five hundred miles away was talking through the darkness. “We live and work and make life tenser with it, and do wonders with it, but, after all, who knows what it is?” He remembered how the great, shadowy eyes had looked into his face. “And what is love?” she had sighed. “We live and die for it, we see it work its terrible wonders; but who can ever tell us what it is?”