thing
of the vast underlying solidarity of human existence. A humble baby in a
go-cart waited at one of the crossings for the traffic to pass, and
bending over, she hugged him ecstatically, not because he reminded her
of Harry, but simply because he was a baby.

"He is so sweet I just had to squeeze him," she said to his mother, a
working woman in a black shawl, who stood behind him.

Then the two women smiled at each other in that freemasonry of
motherhood of which no man is aware, and Virginia wondered why people
had ever foolishly written of the "indifference of a crowd." The chill
which had lain over her heart since her meeting with Oliver melted
utterly in the glow with which she had embraced the baby at the
crossing. With the feeling of his warm little body in her arms,
everything had become suddenly right again. New York was no longer a
dreadful city, and Oliver's failure appeared as brief as the passing
pang of a toothache. Her natural optimism had returned like a rosy mist
to embellish and obscure the prosaic details of the situation. Like the
cheerful winter sunshine, which transfigured the harsh outlines of the
houses, her vision adorned the reality in the mere act of beholding it.

Midway of the next block there was a jeweller's window full of gems set
in intricate patterns, and stopping before it, she studied the trinkets
carefully in the hope of being able to describe them to Lucy. Then a man
selling little automatic pigs at the corner attracted her attention, and
she bought two for Harry and Jenny, and carried them triumphantly away
in boxes under her arm. She knew that she looked countrified and
old-fashioned, and that nobody she met was wearing either a hat or a
dress which in the least resembled the style of hers; but the knowledge
of this did not trouble her, because in her heart she preferred the kind
of clothes which were worn in Dinwiddie. The women in New York seemed to
her artificial and affected in appearance, and they walked, she thought,
as if they were trying to make people look at them. The bold way they
laced in their figures she regarded as almost indecent, and she noticed
that they looked straight into the eyes of men instead of lowering their
lashes when they passed them. Her provincialism, like everything else
which belonged to her and had become endeared by habit and association,
seemed to her so truly beautiful and desirable that she would not have
parted with it for worlds.

Turn