Yet during this speech he had shot furtive little questioning looks at her face, as if to read those thoughts he knew she would not put into words.
But she only smiled at Bernal. Her husband, however, found her more difficult than ever after communicating his news to her. He tried once to imagine her being dissatisfied with him for some reason. But this attempt he abandoned. Thereafter he attributed her coldness, aloofness, silence, and moodiness to some nervous malady peculiar to the modern woman. Bernal's presence kept him from noting how really pronounced and unwavering her aversion had become.
Nor did Bernal note her attitude. Whatever he may have read in Allan at those times when the look of cold appraisement was turned full upon him, he had come to know of his brother's wife only that she was Nancy of the old days, strangely surviving to greet him and be silent with him, or to wonder with him when he came in out of that preposterous machine of many wheels that they called the town. No one but Nancy saw anything about it to wonder at.
To Bernal, after his years in the big empty places, it was a part of all the world and of all times compacted in a small space. One might see in it ancient Jerusalem, Syria, Persia, Rome and modern Babylon--with something still peculiar and unclassifiable that one would at length have to call New York. And to make it more absorbing, the figures were always moving. Where so many were pressed together each was weighted by a thousand others--the rich not less than the poor; each was stirred to quick life and each was being visibly worn down by the ceaseless friction.
When he had walked the streets for a week, he saw the city as a huge machine, a machine to which one might not even deliver a message without becoming a part of it--a wheel of it. It was a machine always readjusting, always perfecting, always repairing itself--casting out worn or weak parts and taking in others--ever replacing old wheels with new ones, and never disdaining any new wheel that found its place--that could give its cogs to the general efficiency, consenting to be worn down by the unceasing friction.
Looking down Broadway early one evening--a shining avenue of joy--he thought of the times when he had gazed across a certain valley of his West and dreamed of bringing a message to this spot.