the other boarders. "What _has_
happened?" they said to each other, blankly. "She'll be an awful wet
blanket," some one said, frowning; and some one else said, "She's
accepted because she won't let him out at night, alone!")

When the heterogeneous household gathered in the dining room, and corks
popped and jokes were made, Eleanor and Maurice were there; he, watching
the other people eat and drink and saying almost nothing; she, talking
nervously and trying hard to be slangy about astronomy. Once he looked
at her with faint interest--for she was so evidently "trying"! At
midnight they all toiled up four flights of stairs from the basement to
the garret, where, with proper squeamishness on the part of the ladies,
and much gallantry of pushing and pulling on the part of the gentlemen,
and all sorts of awkwardnesses and displaying of legs, they climbed a
ladder and got out through the scuttle on to the flat roof. Then came
the calculating of minutes, and facetiousness as to other people's
watches and directions as to what one might expect to see. "It'll look
like a bite out of a cookie, when it begins," the bond salesman said;
and Miss Ladd tittered, and said what the ladies wanted to see was the
man in the moon!

Maurice, intolerably irked, had moved across to the parapet and was
staring out over the city. Below him spread the dim expanse of roofs and
chimneys, with here and there the twinkle of light in an attic window.
Leaning on the coping and looking down, he thought of the humanity under
the dark roofs: a horizontal humanity--everybody asleep! The ugly fancy
came to him that if that sleeping layer of bodies could be stirred up,
there would be instantly a squirming mass of loathsome thoughts--maggots
of lust, and shame, and jealousy, and fear. "My God! we're a nasty lot,"
he thought.

"Look!" a voice said at his shoulder. He sighed, impatiently--and
looked. Above him soared the abyss of space, velvet black, pricked
faintly here and there by stars; and, riding high--eternal and
serene--the Moon.

He heard Miss Moore say, "_It's beginning._" ... And the solemn curve of
the Shadow touched the great disk. No one spoke: they stood--a handful
of little human creatures, staring up into immensity; specks of
consciousness on a whirling ball that was rushing forever into the void,
and, as it rushed, its shadow, sweeping soundless through the emptiness
of Space, touched the watching Moon ... and the broad plaque, silver
g