She felt new courage, new faith. She wanted to leave the boat and merge
with those buildings and those swarming streets. She was proud of the
great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the powers
that ruled this immensity.

But beyond all she felt the city's _livingness_. The air seemed charged
with human activity, with toil-pulsations. She was all crowded about
with human beings, and felt the mystery of what might be termed
_crowd-touch_. Here, surely, was life--life thick, happy, busy, daring,
ideal. Here was pioneering--a reaching forth to a throbbing future. So,
as the boat landed, she mentally identified herself with this city,
labeled herself New-Yorker, and became one of its millions.

Her rapture lasted throughout her first stay. She tasted romance
glancing in shop windows or moving in a crowd or riding in an elevated
train. A letter of introduction to a friend of her mother's secured her
a companion, who "showed her the sights" and helped her choose her
boarding-house in East Eightieth Street. And then came the examinations
for public-school teaching; and after these she went home for the
summer, returning to New York in the fall.

Then her new life began, the rapture ceased, and Myra Craig, like so
many others, found that her existence in the city was just as narrow as
it had been in the town. In some ways, more narrow. She was quite
without friends, quite without neighborhood. Her day consisted in
teaching from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M., correcting papers and planning lessons
and making reports until well into the evening, sometimes until late in
the night, and meeting at meals unfriendly people that she disliked. Her
class was composed of rather stupid, rather dirty children. They
_smelled_--a thing she never forgave them. And what could one woman do