were in shadow; but beyond the irregular black boughs of the trees the
sky was still suffused with the burning light of the sunset. Over the
head of the great bronze Washington a single last gleam of sunshine shot
suddenly before it vanished amid the spires and chimneys of the city,
which looked as visionary and insubstantial as the glowing horizon.

Stopping midway of the road, Stephen Culpeper glanced back over the
vague streets and the clearer distance, where the approaching dusk spun
mauve and silver cobwebs of air. From that city, it seemed to him, a new
and inscrutable force--the force of an idea--had risen within the last
few months to engulf the Square and all that the Square had ever meant
in his life. Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched
the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past
remained untouched. Not the old buildings, not the old trees, not even
the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of
electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the
sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of
concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's
day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked
and undistinguished--yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising.
Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer
things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he
lived.

As he lifted his face to the sky, his grave young features revealed a
subtle kinship to the statues beneath the mounted Washington in the
drive, as if both flesh and bronze had been moulded by the dominant
spirit of race. Like the heroes of the Revolution, he appeared a
stranger in an age which had degraded manners and enthroned commerce;
and like them also he seemed to survey the present from some