e wouldn't have put this thing through without some
personal end in sight."

"Might not he be disinterested, for once?"

"Not O'Connor," said Smith, dryly. "But good heavens! haven't we
talked intrigues and cabals and plots long enough? There are one or
two other things in life, you know--I've hardly given you a chance to
speak, and I've been holding forth like an unsuccessful detective
reporting to his superior officer."

And the conversation drifted into other channels.

A great city is a wonderful place in a thousand ways, not the least of
which is its magical influence upon human relationships. Perhaps its
mere size, the multiplicity of its sights and sounds, its effect of
isolating an individual in the midst of an almost impenetrable
throng--perhaps these things are chiefly responsible. But it is
certain that, in common with the desert and the sea, a city like London
or Paris or New York carries in its very atmosphere a sense of almost
devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. In the very
shrine of the unreal and the artificial, reality grips with a power
elsewhere unknown. Beyond all the curious striving for the immaterial,
the sense of the utter futility of that very effort becomes wholly
clear. Follies and affectations may be sought with added fervor for
the mind and the body, but the want of them is stilled in the soul.

Since this is so, in the very home of conventions and conventionalities
these artificial ideas become more palpably ridiculous. Surrounded by
needless man-made fetters, one sees them to be inane. The wind that
blows between the worlds blows in the world's great cities, and it
blows, for their lovers at least, the cobwebs from the heart. What is
natural is seen to be right, and what is real is seen to be true.

To Smith, lover of his city as he was, these truths were peculiarly
obvious; and to Helen Maitland, seeing them largely from the angle of
Smith's vision, they became the truth no less. She remembered with
some surprise her quite recent dislike of New York, and her even more
recent chill of distaste and dread, when she came from the Park, which
had checked for the moment the liking she felt springing to life. Of
course it was loneliness; but here was a man who had told her that New
York's loneliness was one of its greatest charms, and who regarded the
apparent heartlessness of the city as one of its most inspiring tonics.
Somehow, and apparently most natural