urous, it has small patience with methods that
slowness alone has stamped as legitimate. Worshiping a deification of
real estate, and with a rude aristocracy building upon the blood of
the sow and the tallow of the bull, its atmosphere discourages one
artist while inviting another to rake up the showered rewards of a
"boom" patronage. Feeling that naught but sleepiness and sloth should
be censured, it resents even a kindly criticism. Quick to recognize
the feasibility of a scheme; giving money, but holding time as a
sacred inheritance. It is a re-gathering of the forces that peopled
America and then made her great among nations; a mighty community with
a growing literary force and with its culture and its real love for
the beautiful largely confined to the poor in purse; grand in a
thousand respects; with its history glaring upon the black sky of
night; with the finest boulevards in America and the filthiest
alleys--a giant in need of a bath.

The Colossus stood as a towering island with "a tide in the affairs of
men" sweeping past. And it seemed to Henry that the buggy was cast
ashore as a piece of driftwood that touches land and finds a lodgment.
At an earlier day, and not so long ago either, the flaw of unconscious
irony might have been picked in the name Colossus, but now the
establishment, covering almost a block and rising story upon story,
filled in the outlines of its pretentious christening.

"Tap, tap, tap--cash, 46; tap, tap--cash, 63," was the leading strain
in this din of extensive barter and petty transaction. The Colossus
boasted that it could meet every commercial demand; supply a
sewing-machine needle or set up a saw-mill; receipt for gas bills and
water rates or fit out a general store. Under one roof it held the
resources of a city. Henry was startled by its immensity, and as he
followed Witherspoon through labyrinths of bright gauzes and avenues
of somber goods, he perceived that a change in the tone of the hum
announced the approach of the master. And it appeared that, no matter
what a girl might be doing, she began hurriedly to do something else
the moment she spied Witherspoon coming toward her. The quick signs of
flirtation, signals along the downward track of morality, subsided
whenever this ruler came within sight; and the smirk bargain-counter
miss would actually turn from the grinning idiocy of the bullet-headed
fellow who had come in to admire her and would deign to wait on a
poorly dresse