On the wet pavements and reeking iron overhead structure along Sixth
Avenue the street lights glimmered, lending to the filthy avenue under
its rusty tunnel a mystery almost picturesque.
Into it he turned, swung aboard a car as it shot groaning and clanking
around the curve from Fifty-ninth Street, and settled down to brood and
ponder and consider until it was time for him to swing off the car into
the slimy street once more.
Silvery pools of light inlaid the dim expanse of Washington Square. He
turned east, then south, then east again, and doubled into a dim street,
where old-time houses with toppling dormers crowded huddling together as
though in the cowering contact there was safety from the destroyer who
must one day come, bringing steel girders and cement to mark their
graves with sky-scraping monuments of stone.
Into the doorway of one of these houses Lansing turned. When the town
was young a Lansing had lived there in pomp and circumstance--his own
great-grandfather--and he smiled grimly, amused at the irony of things
terrestrial.
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