e ramparts loopholed for
defense; the people were bright but bloodless spectres passing in
sinister and selfish array.

The thing that weighed heaviest on Raggles's soul and clogged his
poet's fancy was the spirit of absolute egotism that seemed to
saturate the people as toys are saturated with paint. Each one that
he considered appeared a monster of abominable and insolent conceit.
Humanity was gone from them; they were toddling idols of stone and
varnish, worshipping themselves and greedy for though oblivious of
worship from their fellow graven images. Frozen, cruel, implacable,
impervious, cut to an identical pattern, they hurried on their ways
like statues brought by some miracles to motion, while soul and
feeling lay unaroused in the reluctant marble.

Gradually Raggles became conscious of certain types. One was an
elderly gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled
face and stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in the fashion of a gilded
youth, who seemed to personify the city's wealth, ripeness and
frigid unconcern. Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful,
clear as a steel engraving, goddess-like, calm, clothed like the
princesses of old, with eyes as coldly blue as the reflection of
sunlight on a glacier. And another was a by-product of this town of
marionettes--a broad, swaggering, grim, threateningly sedate fellow,
with a jowl as large as a harvested wheat field, the complexion of
a baptized infant and the knuckles of a prize-fighter. This type
leaned against cigar signs and viewed the world with frapped
contumely.

A poet is a sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shrivelled in
the bleak embrace of the undecipherable. The chill, sphinx-like,
ironical, illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left
him downcast and bewildered. Had it no heart? Better the woodpile,
the scolding of vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly
spleen of bartenders behind provincial free-lunch counters, the
amiable truculence of rural constables, the kicks, arrests and
happy-go-lucky chances of the other vulgar, loud, crude cities than
this freezing heartlessness.

Raggles summoned his courage and sought alms from the populace.
Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash
to testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he
said to himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was
without a soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires
and sp