elpers is the lowdest they
send wags and lix and glad to here Daddy is doing so well in buisness
with respects from

MRS. SPANIEL.

He did not let Mrs. Purp know of the change in his condition, and every
morning left his lodging at the usual time. By some curious attraction
he felt drawn to that downtown region where his kinsman's office was.
This part of the city he had not properly explored.

It was a world wholly different from Fifth Avenue. There was none of
that sense of space and luxury he had known on the wide slopes of Murray
Hill. He wandered under terrific buildings, in a breezy shadow where
javelins of colourless sunlight pierced through thin slits, hot
brilliance fell in fans and cascades over the uneven terrace of roofs.
Here was where husbands worked to keep Fifth Avenue going: he wondered
vaguely whether Mrs. Sealyham had bought those stockings? One day he
saw his uncle hurrying along Wall Street with an intent face. Gissing
skipped into a doorway, fearing to be recognized. He knew that the old
fellow would insist on taking him to lunch at the Pedigree Club, would
talk endlessly, and ask family questions. But he was on the scent of
matters that talk could not pursue.

He perceived a sense of pressure, of prodigious poetry and beauty and
amazement. This was a strange jungle of life. Tall coasts of windows
stood up into the pure brilliant sky: against their feet beat a dark
surf of slums. In one foreign street, too deeply trenched for sunlight,
oranges were the only gold. The water, reaching round in two arms, came
close: there was a note of husky summons in the whistles of passing
craft. Almost everywhere, sharp above many smells of oils and spices,
the whiff of coffee tingled his busy nose. Above one huge precipice
stood a gilded statue--a boy with wings, burning in the noon. Brilliance
flamed between the vanes of his pinions: the intangible thrust of that
pouring light seemed about to hover him off into blue air.

The world of working husbands was more tender than that of shopping
wives: even in all their business, they had left space and quietness for
the dead. Sunken among the crags he found two graveyards. They were cups
of placid brightness. Here, looking upward, it was like being drowned
on the floor of an ocean of light. Husbands had built their offices
half-way to the sky rather than disturb these. Perhaps they appreciate
rest all the more, Gissing thought, because they get so l