ts and changes, revolutions and cross
currents, upheavals and in-fallings that affect this world, there is
one great street which, except for a new building here and there,
resolutely maintains its persistent sameness. Its face is like that of
a large, heavily made-up and not unbeautiful woman, veil-less and with
some dignity but only two expressions, enticement and indifference. A
man may be lost at the North Pole, left to die on the west coast of
Africa, married in London, or forcibly detained in Siberia, but, let
him return to life and New York, and he will find that whatever
elsewhere Anno Domini may have defaced and civilization made different,
next to nothing has happened to Fifth Avenue.

Martin had told Howard of the way he had found Joan on the hill, how
she had climbed out of window that night and come to him to be rescued
and how he had brought her to town to find Alice Palgrave away and
married her. All that, but not one word of his having been shown the
door on the night of the wedding, of her preference for Palgrave, her
plunge into night life, or his own odd hut human adventure with Susie
Capper as a result of the accident. But for the fact that it wasn't his
way to speak about his wife whatever she did or left undone, Martin
would have been thankful to have made a clean breast of everything.
Confession is good for the soul, and Martin's young soul needed to be
relieved of many bewilderments and pains and questionings. He wished
that he could have continued the story to Howard of the kid's way Joan
had treated him,--a way which had left him stultified,--of how, touched
by the tragedy that had reduced the poor little waif of the chorus to
utter grief and despair, he had taken her out to the country to get
healing in God's roofless cathedral, and of how, treating her, because
of his love and admiration of Joan, with all the respect and tenderness
that he would have shown a sister, it had given him the keenest
pleasure and delight to help her back to optimism and sanity. He would
like to have told Howard all the simple and charming details of that
good week, giving him a sympathetic picture of the elfish Tootles
enjoying her brief holiday out in the open, and of her recovery under
the inspiration of trees and flowers and brotherliness, to all of which
she was so pathetically unaccustomed. He wouldn't have told of the many
efforts made by Tootles to pay him back in the only way that seemed to
her to be possib