gigantic,
crude with the crudity of youth, disdaining rivalry; sane and healthy
and vigorous; brutal in its ambition, arrogant in the new-found
knowledge of its giant strength, prodigal of its wealth, infinite in
its desires. In its capacity boundless, in its courage indomitable;
subduing the wilderness in a single generation, defying calamity, and
through the flame and the debris of a commonwealth in ashes, rising
suddenly renewed, formidable, and Titanic.

Laura, her eyes dizzied, her ears stunned, watched tirelessly.

"There is something terrible about it," she murmured, half to herself,
"something insensate. In a way, it doesn't seem human. It's like a
great tidal wave. It's all very well for the individual just so long as
he can keep afloat, but once fallen, how horribly quick it would crush
him, annihilate him, how horribly quick, and with such horrible
indifference! I suppose it's civilisation in the making, the thing that
isn't meant to be seen, as though it were too elemental,
too--primordial; like the first verses of Genesis."

The impression remained long with her, and not even the gaiety of their
little supper could altogether disperse it. She was a little
frightened--frightened of the vast, cruel machinery of the city's life,
and of the men who could dare it, who conquered it. For a moment they
seemed, in a sense, more terrible than the city itself--men for whom
all this crash of conflict and commerce had no terrors. Those who could
subdue it to their purposes, must they not be themselves more terrible,
more pitiless, more brutal? She shrank a little. What could women ever
know of the life of men, after all? Even Landry, extravagant as he was,
so young, so exuberant, so seemingly innocent--she knew that he was
spoken of as a good business man. He, too, then had his other side. For
him the Battle of the Street was an exhilaration. Beneath that boyish
exterior was the tough coarseness, the male hardness, the callousness
that met the brunt and withstood the shock of onset.

Ah, these men of the city, what could women ever know of them, of their
lives, of that other existence through which--freed from the influence
of wife or mother, or daughter or sister--they passed every day from
nine o'clock till evening? It was a life in which women had no part,
and in which, should they enter it, they would no longer recognise son
or husband, or father or brother. The gentle-mannered fellow,
clean-minded, clean-handed