edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to
a back-yard garden where rose-beds lead to a dancing-faun terminal in
a shrine of ivy.

They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had
the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of
benison; and Carl read from Yeats.

He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew
and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now.

His hand rested on her gloved hand.... Tony the waiter
re-re-rearranged the serving-table.... When Ruth broke the spell with,
"You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves," they chattered
like blackbirds at sunset.

Carl discovered that, being a New-Yorker, she knew part of it as
intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest.
She had taught him Fifth Avenue; told him the history of the invasion
by shops, the social differences between East and West; pointed out
the pictures of friends in photographers' wall-cases. Now he taught
her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles.
Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford
quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation
dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of
Italian _tables d'hote_, clerks, social-workers, and radical
magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground;
lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian
lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with
gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. From the same small-paned
windows where frowsy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's
ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Washington.

On an open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The
Woolworth Tower, to the south, was an immortal shaft of ivory and gold
against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals
of the Old World, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce
which built and uses it. The Hudson was lustrous with sun, and a sweet
wind sang from unknown Jersey hills across the river. Moored to the
wharf was a coal-barge, with a tiny dwelling-cabin at whose windows
white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden tended by the
bargeman's comely white-browed wife; a dozen daisies and geraniums in
two starch-boxes.

Forging down the river a scarred tramp steamer, whose rusty sides the
sun turned to damask rose,