The invasion was unostentatious.  No one could have dreamed that the tall, homely man, dashing in and out in his shirt-sleeves between the rooms and the moving-van drawn up at the curb, had come down with the deliberate purpose of making a neighborhood out of a chaos, of organizing that jumble of scattered polyglot lives....  In the faded sunshine of the unusually warm winter afternoon, with its vistas of gold-dusty air, and its noise of playing children and on-surging trolleys and trucks and all the minute life of the saloons and the stores—­women hanging out of windows to get the recreation of watching the confused drama of the streets, neighbors meeting in doorways, young men laughing and chatting in clusters about lamp-posts—­Joe toiled valiantly and happily.  He would rapidly glance at the thickly peopled street and wonder, with a thrill, how soon he would include these lives in his own, how soon he would grip and rouse and awaken the careless multitude....

All was strange, all was new.  Everything that was deep in his life—­all the roots he had put down through boyhood, youth, and manhood into the familiar life of Yorkville—­was torn up and transplanted to this fresh and unfriendly soil....  He felt as if he were in an alien land, under new skies, in a new clime, and there was all the romance of the mysterious and all the fear of the untried.  Beginnings always have the double quality of magic and timidity—­the dreaded, delicious first plunge into cold water, the adventurous striking out into unknown perils....  Did it not at moments seem like madness to dare single-handed into this vast and careless population?  Was he not merely a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills?  Well, so be it, he thought; the goal might be unreachable, but the quest was life itself.

He had an inkling of the monstrous size of New York.  All his days he had lived within a half-hour’s ride of Greenwich Village, and yet it was a new world to him.  So the whole city was but a conglomeration of nests of worlds, woven together by a few needs and the day’s work, worlds as yet undiscovered in every direction, huge tracts of peoples of all races leading strange and unassimilated lives.  He felt lost in the crowded immensity, a helpless, obscure unit in the whirl of life.

He had fallen in love with Greenwich Village from the first day he had explored it for a promising dwelling-place.  Here, he knew, lived Sally Heffer, and here doubtless he would meet her and she would help shape his fight, perhaps be the woman to gird on his armor, put sword in his hand, and send him forth.  For he needed her, needed her as a child needs a teacher, as a recruit needs a disciplined veteran.  It was she who had first revealed the actual world to him; it was she who had first divined his power and his purpose; it was she who had released him from guilt by showing him a means of expiation.

And yet, withal, he feared to meet her.  There had been something terrible about her that afternoon at Carnegie Hall, and something that awed him that evening at the Woman’s League.  Until she had broken down and wept, she had hardly seemed a woman—­rather a voice crying in the wilderness, a female Isaiah, the toilers become articulate.  And he could not think of her as a simple, vivacious young woman.  How would she greet him?  Would her eyes remember his part in the fire?