"I'll take the room," he returned, ignoring what she had said as well as what she had implied about Cyrus. Then as she tripped ahead of him, he entered the dismantled hall, filled with broken pieces of fine old furniture, and ascended the stairs as far as the third storey. When she turned a loosened door-knob and passed before him into the little room at the back, he saw first of all the narrow window, with its torn green shade, beyond which clustered a blur of silvery foliage in the midst of red roofs and huddled chimneys. From this hilltop, he could look down unseen on that bit of the universal life which was Dinwiddie. He could watch the town at work and at play; he could see those twenty-one thousand souls either moved as a unit by the secret forces which ignore individuality, or separated and enclosed by that impenetrable wall of personality which surrounded each atom among them. He could follow the divisions of class and the still deeper divisions of race as they were symbolized in the old brick walls, overgrown with young grasses, which girdled the ancient gardens in High Street. From the dazzling glimpses of white muslin under honeysuckle arbours, to the dusky forms that swarmed like spawn in the alleys, the life of Dinwiddie loved, hated, enjoyed, and suffered beneath him. And over this love and this hatred, this enjoyment and this suffering, there presided--an outward and visible sign of the triumph of industrialism--the imposing brick walls of the new Treadwell tobacco factory. A soft voice spoke in his ear, and turning, he looked into the face of Mrs. Peachey, whom he had almost forgotten. "You will find the sun warm in the afternoon, I am afraid," she murmured, still with her manner of pleasantly humouring him which he found later to be an unconscious expression of her half maternal, wholly feminine attitude toward his sex. "Oh, I daresay it will be all right," he responded. "I shall work so hard that I shan't have time to bother about the weather."