Leaning there out of the lofty studio window, the young alien sighed with the burden of his youthful disappointments and his great things still undone. He looked less hopelessly down at the lights of a city which he had grown, in a softer mood, to think of as more beautiful.
Then he glanced at Repellier once more. This quiet man beside him, he felt, must have dreamed his way even more slowly into the heart of that turbulent life. For from a withered old hack writer on his news bureau Hartley had picked up a fragmentary story to the effect that Repellier had first come to New York a broken-hearted man, in search of a runaway sister. She had killed herself, he remembered the story went, when Repellier had tried to take her home, for she had passed through things that are seldom forgiven, and never forgotten. Recalling this, Hartley peered through the gloom at the other man, as though to read his face more closely. But the past seemed to have left no trace.
"That disorderly, happy-go-lucky tangle and snarl of lights on your left," his companion was saying quietly, "is your East Side, and that sinister scar of brighter light across it like a sword-gash is the Bowery itself. You can see how different they are to these prim rows on the West Side!"
"Which stand for happiness, and, accordingly, more or less for dulness."
"There's a good deal of nonsense talked and written about the slums, Hartley, and they're wept and prayed and shuddered over, through lorgnettes, but, after all, you hear about as much laughing on Hester Street as you do on West End Avenue."
Hartley recalled the sounds that crept up to his little tenement room of a hot midsummer night. "And quite as much weeping."
"Perhaps a little more, for the Submerged Tenth has never been taught to nurse its sorrows in silence. But it's all taught me one big lesson--it's a truth so obvious that it puzzles me to think it should come so late in life. Wherever it beats," and here the older man's voice dropped into a sudden deeper tone of earnestness, "the old unchanging human heart runs with the same old unchanging human blood, and aches with the same old unchanging human aches. It's such a simple old truth, though, the world never accepts it."
