Alighting in Grand Central Terminus late at night, he made his way to
Forty-second Street and there, in the staring headlines of a "Late Extra,"
read the news that the steamship _Saratoga_ had suffered a crippling
engine-room accident and was limping slowly toward port, still something
like eighteen hours out.

Wondering if it were presumption to construe this as an omen that the stars
in their courses fought for him, Lanyard went west to Broadway afoot, all
the way beset with a sense of incredulity; it was difficult to believe that
he was himself, alive and at large in this city of wonder and space, where
people moved at leisure and without fear on broad streets that resembled
deep-bitten channels for rivers of light. He was all too wont with nights
of dread and trembling, with the mediaeval gloom that enwrapped the cities
of Europe by night, their grim black streets desolate but for a few,
infrequent, scurrying shapes of fright.... While here the very beggars
walked with heads unbowed, and men and women of happier estate laughed and
played and made love lightly in the scampering taxis that whisked them
homeward from restaurants of the feverish midnight.

A people at war, actually at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to
defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus
incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, refusing to credit
its peril....

Here and there a recruiting poster, down the broad reaches of Fifth Avenue
a display of bunting, no other hint of war-time spirit and gravity....

Longacre Square, a weltering lake of kaleidoscopic radiance, even at this
late hour thronged with carnival crowds, not one note of sobriety in the