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ected these. To find an entire top floor in New York at such a price was as amazing as it was comfortable to the girl who had not expected to be able to afford more than a small bedroom. * * * * * She had a little money left, enough to purchase food and a few pots and pans to cook it over the gas range in one of the smaller rooms. And here she and Hafiz had their first meal on the long world-trail stretching away before her. After which she sat for a while by the window in a stiff arm-chair, thinking of Clive and of his silence, and of the young girl he was one day to marry. Southward, the lights of the city began to break out and sparkle through the autumn haze; tall towers, hitherto invisible, suddenly glimmered against the sky-line. A double vista of lighted street lamps stretched east and west below her. The dusty-violet light of evening softened the shabby street below, veiling ugliness and squalor and subtly transmuting meanness and poverty to picturesqueness--as artists, using only the flattering simplicity of essentials, show us in etching and aquarelle the romance of the commonplace. And so the rusty iron balconies of a chop suey across the street became quaint and curious: dragon and swinging gilded sign, banner and garish fretwork grew mellow and mysterious under the ruddy Hunter's Moon sailing aloft out of the city's haze like a great Chinese lantern. From an unseen steeple or two chimes sounded the hour. Farther away in the city a bell answered. It is not a city of belfries and chimes; only locally and by hazard are bell notes distinguishable above the interminable rolling monotone of the streets. And now, the haze thickening, distant reverberations, deep, mellow, melancholy, grew in the night air: fog horns from the two rivers and the bay. Leaning both elbows on the sill of the opened window Athalie gazed wearily into the street where noisy children shrilled at one another and dodged vehicles like those quick tiny creatures whirling on ponds. Here and there, the flare of petroleum torches lighted push-carts piled with fruit or laden with bowls of lemonade and hokey-pokey. Sidewalks were crowded with shabby people gossiping in groups or passing east and west--about what squalid business only they could know. On the stoops of all the dwellings, brick or brownstone, people sat; the men in shirt-sleeves, the young girls bare-headed, and in light summer g
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