the way had been swept clear before him. He walked home as if
upon air.

And then there was the excitement of telling the family about it. He
had an idea that his brother might be alarmed if he were told about the
seriousness of the case; and so he simply said that the Judge had
brought him a rich client, and that it was an insurance case. Oliver,
who knew and cared nothing about law, asked no questions, and contented
himself with saying, "I told you how easy it was to make money in New
York, if only you knew the right people!" As for Alice, she had known
all along that her cousin was a great man, and that clients would come
to him as soon as he hung out his sign.

His sign was not out yet, by the way; that was the next thing to be
attended to. He must get himself an office at once, and some books, and
begin to read up insurance law; and so, bright and early the next
morning, he took the subway down town.

And here, for the first time, Montague saw the real New York. All the
rest was mere shadow--the rest was where men slept and played, but
there was where they fought out the battle of their lives. Here the
fierce intensity of it smote him in the face--he saw the cruel waste
and ruin of it, the wreckage of the blind, haphazard strife.

It was a city caught in a trap. It was pent in at one end of a narrow
little island. It had been no one's business to foresee that it must
some day outgrow this space; now men were digging a score of tunnels to
set it free, but they had not begun these until the pressure had become
unendurable, and now it had reached its climax. In the financial
district, land had been sold for as much as four dollars a square inch.
Huge blocks of buildings shot up to the sky in a few months--fifteen,
twenty, twenty-five stories of them, and with half a dozen stories hewn
out of the solid rock beneath; there was to be one building of
forty-two stories, six hundred and fifty feet in height. And between
them were narrow chasms of streets, where the hurrying crowds
overflowed the sidewalks. Yet other streets were filled with trucks and
heavy vehicles, with electric cars creeping slowly along, and little
swirls and eddies of people darting across here and there.

These huge buildings were like beehives, swarming with life and
activity, with scores of elevators shooting through them at bewildering
speed. Everywhere was the atmosphere of rush; the spirit of it seized
hold of one, and he began to hurry, ev