"A street light glimmered in the front windows, so that I did not turn on the gas at first, but sat looking down at the people strolling along the pavement below. The house stands very close to the street, so that I could hear everything any one said in passing, and it seemed to bring me right into the thick of things, as I so often wished to be, back there in the desert. The warm, wet smell of the freshly sprinkled streets, the whiff of an occasional cigar, the sound of a street piano in the next block, all seemed so strange yet so friendly and sociable. It made me feel for a little while--oh, I can hardly explain it--as if the old Mary Ware that I used to be was a million miles away, and as if the Mary Ware sitting here in Riverville was an entirely different person. I couldn't make it seem possible that the 'me' who was sitting there in the hot June dusk, looking down on the lively streets, was the same person who only a few days before had no other excitement in life than making Jack's coffee or ironing Norman's shirts back in the hills of Arizona.
"I wasn't homesick or lonesome in the least, but I had such a queer, untied, set-adrift sensation, like the man must have had who wrote that hymn, 'Lo, on a narrow neck of land, 'Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.' The yesterdays are one sea, and the to-morrows another, and me, waiting between them, just a scrap of humanity--a stranger in a strange city--wondering and wondering and wondering what the next day would bring.
"Then I began to be almost afraid of what I'd undertaken, and all of a sudden grew so cold and depressed that I wished I was back in my own little room in Lone-Rock. The shutters of the back window had been closed all this time, and when I got up to light the gas and write to Jack of my safe arrival, I opened them to see what kind of an outlook I was to have from that window. You can imagine my surprise when I found that it gave me a glimpse of the river. Such a wide, full, sweeping river, with just enough of a young moon over it to define its banks, and remind me of the beautiful silvery Potomac that I used to watch from my window at Warwick Hall.
"A big steamboat came gliding around the bend, with a deep musical whistle that sent the same kind of an echo booming along the water, and there were lights twinkling from every deck and from the wharves along shore to which it was headed. Somehow it made me think of a song that we used to sing at the Wigwam, and that Holland always sang wrong, for some unaccountable reason insisting on saying 'shining' instead of 'margin.'