He had smiled over some of the phrases in this letter, particularly, "I feel that the city is a mistake." Would Myra ever know that her very personality and all of her life were interwoven inextricably with the industrial city--that the clothes she wore, the food she ate, the books she studied, the letter she wrote him, even down to ink, pen, and paper, the education and advantages she enjoyed, were all wrought in the mills, the mines, the offices, and by the interchange and inweaving and mighty labors of industrialism? The city teacher is paid by taxes levied on the commerce and labors of men, and the very farmer cannot heighten his life without exchange with the city.
And so her letter made him smile. Yet at the same time it stirred him mightily. All through it he could read renunciation; she was giving him up; she was loosening her hold over him; she was nobly sacrificing her love to his life-work. And she announced herself as teachable and receptive. She could not yet understand, but understanding might come in time.
So in the night he tried to send his thought over the hills, flash his spirit into hers, in the great hope that she would thrill with a new comprehension, a new awakening.... In a world so mysterious, in an existence so strange, so impossible, so unbelievable, might such a miracle be stranger than the breath he breathed and the passions he felt?
And so in that hope, that great wild hope, he fell asleep in the uneventful beginnings of the battle. And all through those unconscious hours forces were shaping about him and within him to bear his life through strange ways and among strange people. His theories, so easy as he drank them out of books, were to be tested in the living world of men and women, in that reality that hits back when we strike it, and that batters us about like driftwood in the whirlpool.
Standing on Washington Heights--that hump on northwestern Manhattan Island--gazing, say, from a window of the City College whose gray and quaint cluster fronts the morn as on a cliff above the city--one sees, at seven of a sharp morning, a low-hung sun in the eastern skies, a vast circle and lift of mild blue heavens, and at one's feet, down below, the whole sweep of New York from the wooded ridges of the Bronx to the Fifty-ninth Street bridge and the golden tip of the Metropolitan Tower. It is a flood of roofs sweeping south to that golden, flashing minaret, a flood bearing innumerable high mill chimneys, church steeples, school spires, and the skeleton frames of gas-works. Far in the east the Harlem River lies like a sheet of dazzling silver, dotted with boats; every skylight, every point of glass or metal on the roofs, flashes in the sun, and, gazing down from that corner in the sky, one sees the visible morning hymn of the city--a drift from thousands of house chimneys of delicate unraveling skeins of white-blue smoke lifting from those human dwellings like aerial spirits. It is the song of humanity rising, the song of the ritual of breaking bread together, of preparation for the day of toil, the song of the mothers sending the men to work, the song of the mothers kissing and packing to school the rosy, laughing children.