The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Poor Wise Man, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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Title: A Poor Wise Man

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Posting Date: November 3, 2008 [EBook #1970]
Release Date: November, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A POOR WISE MAN

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

CHAPTER I

The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened
walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all
a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty.
Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the
river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven and earth. And
again the sun tipped the surrounding hills with gold, while the city
lay buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts of river boats moved
spectrally along.

Sometimes it was ugly, sometimes beautiful, but always the city was
powerful, significant, important. It was a vast melting pot. Through its
gates came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers and those
who would destroy those dreams. From all over the world there came men
who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious and dumb,
carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded by men with
cunning eyes.

Raw material, for the crucible of the city, as potentially powerful as
the iron ore which entered the city by the same gate.

The city took them in, gave them sanctuary, and forgot them. But the
shepherds with the cunning eyes remembered.

Lily Cardew, standing in the train shed one morning early in March,
watched such a line go by. She watched it with interest. She had
developed a new interest in people during the year she had been
away. She had seen, in the army camp, similar shuffling lines of men,
transformed in a few hours into ranks of uniformed soldiers, beginning
already to be actuated by the same motive. These aliens, going by, would
become citizens. Very soon now they would appear on the streets in new
American clothes of extraordinary cut and color, their hair cut with
clip