Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street was a brownstone duplicate of the next.  The rocky hill became valuable and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be deducted for the mortgage.  Then Joe graduated from high school, and, lusting for life, took a clerk’s job with one of the big express companies.  He held this for two years, and learned an interesting fact—­namely, that a clerk’s life began at 5 P.M. and ended at 8.30 A.M.  In between the clerk was a dead but skilled machine that did the work of a child.  He learned, besides, that advancement was slow and only for a few, and he saw these few, men past middle life, still underlings.  A man of forty-five with a salary of three thousand was doing remarkably well, and, as a rule, he was a dried-up, negative, timid creature.

Out of all this he went like a stick of dynamite, took the seventeen thousand dollars and went into his father’s business of printing.  Joe was shrewd, despite his open nature; he never liked to be “done”; and so he made money and made it fast.  Besides his printing he did some speculating in real estate, and so at thirty-eight he was a successful business man and could count himself worth nearly a hundred thousand dollars.  He made little use of this money; his was a simple, serious, fun-loving nature, and all his early training had made for plain living and economy.  And so for years he and his mother had boarded in a brownstone boarding-house in the quiet block west of Lexington Avenue up the street.  They spent very little on themselves.  In fact, Joe was too busy.  He was all absorbed in the printery—­he worked early and late—­and of recent years in the stress of business his fine relationship with his mother had rather thinned out.  They began leading separated lives; they began shutting themselves away from each other.

And so here he was, thirty-eight years of his life gone, and what had it all been?  Merely the narrow, steady, city man’s life—­work, rest, a little recreation, sleep.  Outside his mother, his employees, his customers, and the newspapers he knew little of the million-crowded life of the city about him.  He used but one set of streets daily; he did not penetrate the vast areas of existence that cluttered the acres of stone in every direction.  There stood the city, a great fact, and even that afternoon as the wild autumn wind blew from the west and rapid, ragged cloud masses passed huge shadows over the ship-swept Hudson, darkened briefly the hurrying streets, extinguished for a moment the glitter of a skyscraper and went gray-footed over the flats of Long Island, even at that moment terrific forces, fierce aggregations of man-power, gigantic blasts of tamed electricity, gravitation, fire, and steam and steel, made the hidden life of the city cyclonic.  And in that mesh of nature and man the human comedy went on—­there was love and disaster, frolic and the fall of a child, the boy buying candy in a shop, the woman on the operating-table in the hospital.  Who could measure that swirl of life and whither it was leading?  But who could live in the heart of it all and be unaware of it?