She broke in on his tirade with a childish puzzler: “What causes the plague, do you think, Mist’ RoBards?” “Who can tell? It is God’s judgment, the pious men say. The doctors call it an exhalation, a vapor, a miasma; but those are only words to wrap ignorance in. God only knows what causes the plague.” “Harry Chalender says—said——” The word was the toll of a passing bell. The change of tense was like the taking of a life. It silenced her a dreadful while. Then she tried to banish the specter with an impersonal phrase: “Some people say that cholera comes from bad water, and New York has no good water. I can hardly drink the bitter stuff from the pumps, and I can taste the old log pipes in the water that we buy from the Manhattan Company’s well. The rainwater from the roofs is worse. No wonder everybody drinks brandy, and there is so much drunkenness. Harry—many people want to go out into the country, all the way up to the Croton or the Bronx, and bring the pure streams down into the city, and do away with the pumps and cisterns.” RoBards laughed. “That’s an old idea. They talked about it after the yellow fever of 1798. But they found it would cost a million dollars, and gave it up, and let that old villain of an Aaron Burr dig his Manhattan well in the heart of the town. Things are so much higher now that it would cost five millions; and it would take years to lay the miles of pipes. No, no, they’ll never make our wild little Bronx a New York citizen. How much better to come up here into the hills and drink its water where it is born.” “Poor New York!” she sighed, and her head was turned so far about as she looked off to the South that her round chin rested on the round of her shoulder; the somber irises of her eyes were lost in the deep lashes, where there was a hint of a tear, and her throat was a straight line, taut as a whip-cord, from the tip of her tiny ear to the ivory slope of her breast. Her beauty was marble in the repose of intense meditation upon the city abandoned to its fate. He drank it in devotedly before he laughed: “Have you turned into Lot’s wife already, or have you the power to turn those big eyes toward the house? It’s pretty from here.” She startled a little, like the frightened gazelle which was the model of ladylike conduct. Her head came round slowly, and she flicked the dew from her eyes with a quick flutter of the lids. Then the arc of her red lips changed from concave to convex as the sorrowful droop became a warm smile. A dark thought flitted through his mind that at best she found her future prison less dismal than she had imagined it; and that her fatigue would have made her greet even a jail with relief. She had sat so long on so rough a voyage that she could hardly rise. “My limbs have gone to sleep,” she said, and blushed at such a bold allusion. She hardly knew her husband well enough yet for such carelessness.