The boat rounded the tip of the island, furrowing the broad surface of the bay, which seemed as the floor of a stage before that lifting huge sky-lost amphitheater. Every advance changed the many-faceted beauty of New York, and Myra, gazing, had one glimpse across little green Battery Park up the deep twilit cañon of Broadway, the city's spine. The young woman was moved to tears. She seemed to slough off at that moment the church of her youth, averring that New York was too big for a creed. It was the great human outworking; the organism of the mighty many. It seemed a miracle that all this splendor and wonder had been wrought by human hands. Surely human nature was great--greater than she had dreamed. If creatures like herself had wrought this, then she was more than she had dared to imagine, "deeper than ever plummet had sounded." She felt new courage, new faith. She wanted to leave the boat and merge with those buildings and those swarming streets. She was proud of the great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the powers that ruled this immensity.
But beyond all she felt the city's _livingness_. The air seemed charged with human activity, with toil-pulsations. She was all crowded about with human beings, and felt the mystery of what might be termed _crowd-touch_. Here, surely, was life--life thick, happy, busy, daring, ideal. Here was pioneering--a reaching forth to a throbbing future. So, as the boat landed, she mentally identified herself with this city, labeled herself New-Yorker, and became one of its millions.
Her rapture lasted throughout her first stay. She tasted romance glancing in shop windows or moving in a crowd or riding in an elevated train. A letter of introduction to a friend of her mother's secured her a companion, who "showed her the sights" and helped her choose her boarding-house in East Eightieth Street. And then came the examinations for public-school teaching; and after these she went home for the summer, returning to New York in the fall.
Then her new life began, the rapture ceased, and Myra Craig, like so many others, found that her existence in the city was just as narrow as it had been in the town. In some ways, more narrow. She was quite without friends, quite without neighborhood. Her day consisted in teaching from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M., correcting papers and planning lessons and making reports until well into the evening, sometimes until late in the night, and meeting at meals unfriendly people that she disliked. Her class was composed of rather stupid, rather dirty children. They _smelled_--a thing she never forgave them. And what could one woman do with fifty or sixty children? The class was at least three times too big for real teaching, and so almost inevitably a large part of the work became routine--a grind that spoiled her temper and embittered her heart. Her fellow-teachers were an ignorant lot; the principal himself she thought the biggest lump of stupidity she had ever met--a man demanding letter-perfection and caring not one rap for the growth of children. Her week-ends were her only relief, and she used these partly for resting and partly in going to theater and concert.