. Did it not at moments seem like madness to dare
single-handed into this vast and careless population? Was he not merely
a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills? Well, so be it, he thought;
the goal might be unreachable, but the quest was life itself.

He had an inkling of the monstrous size of New York. All his days he had
lived within a half-hour's ride of Greenwich Village, and yet it was a
new world to him. So the whole city was but a conglomeration of nests of
worlds, woven together by a few needs and the day's work, worlds as yet
undiscovered in every direction, huge tracts of peoples of all races
leading strange and unassimilated lives. He felt lost in the crowded
immensity, a helpless, obscure unit in the whirl of life.

He had fallen in love with Greenwich Village from the first day he had
explored it for a promising dwelling-place. Here, he knew, lived Sally
Heffer, and here doubtless he would meet her and she would help shape
his fight, perhaps be the woman to gird on his armor, put sword in his
hand, and send him forth. For he needed her, needed her as a child needs
a teacher, as a recruit needs a disciplined veteran. It was she who had
first revealed the actual world to him; it was she who had first divined
his power and his purpose; it was she who had released him from guilt by
showing him a means of expiation.

And yet, withal, he feared to meet her. There had been something
terrible about her that afternoon at Carnegie Hall, and something that
awed him that evening at the Woman's League. Until she had broken down
and wept, she had hardly seemed a woman--rather a voice crying in the
wilderness, a female Isaiah, the toilers become articulate. And he could
not think of her as a simple, vivacious young woman. How would she greet
him? Would her eyes remember his part in the fire?

At least, so he told himself, he would not seek her out (he had her
address from Fannie Lemick) until he had something to show for his new
life--until, possibly, he had a copy of that magazine which was still a
hypothesis and a chimera. Then he would nerve himself and go to her and
she should judge him as she pleased.

That first supper with his mother had a sweetness new to their lives. He
ran out to the butcher, the grocer, and the delicatessen man, and came
home laden with packages. The stove in the rear kitchen was set alight;
the wooden table in the center was spread with cloth and cutlery; and
they sat down opposite eac