th. The
track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and
tremor of the innumerable lights; the moony sheen of the electrics
mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near; the
architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers, rescued by the
obscurity from all that was ignoble in them, and the coming and going
of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of
flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked
afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters
nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and they were just to the Arachne
roof spun in iron over the cross street on which they ran to the depot;
but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it. They had
another moment of rich silence when they paused in the gallery that
leads from the Elevated station to the waiting-rooms in the Central
Depot and looked down upon the great night trains lying on the tracks
dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred without dispersing the
vast darkness of the place. What forces, what fates, slept in these
bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north and south and west
through the night! Now they waited there like fabled monsters of
Arab story ready for the magician's touch, tractable, reckless,
will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance of life.

The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic
pride in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just
the like. Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her
a lower berth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car. They
made the most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the
car; and she promised to write as soon as she reached home. She promised
also that, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats,
she would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal. Only
he must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below
Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must
have an elevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor. These
were essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without.
But he must get them.

XI.

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to
their ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in their
married life she had taken charge of him in all