And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful as smoking chimneys.  They meant so much—­labor, human beings, fire, warmth.

And over all—­river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the throbbing city behind them—­rose the immense gray-clouded heavens.  A keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear and exhilarant.  Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the tide.  A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug’s pipe; it was moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable.  The whole huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them.

And then the very magic of life was theirs.  The world fell from them, the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted away.  They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them closer.  Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the heavens.  They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the wind together—­they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like gods for new creation.  In that throbbing moment each became the world to the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.

He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.

“I want ...” he began.

“Yes,” she breathed.

He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.

“Myra!”

And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love.  She cried out: 

“Joe!”

And they flung their arms round each other.  She sobbed there, overcome with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.

“Oh,” he cried, “how I love you!...  Myra ...”

“Joe, Joe—­I couldn’t have stood it longer!”

All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one, stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature—­a mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.

“Come home to my mother,” cried Joe.  “Come home with me!”

They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.

“Yes,” she said, “I want to see Joe’s mother.”

It was Joe’s last step to success.  Now he had all—­his work, his love.  He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.

Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets—­everywhere homes, families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere love.  Joe glanced, his eyes filling.  Then he paused.