“Look at that,” he said in a changed voice.

Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were visible—­a lightning seemed to run over them—­a ghastly red lightning—­sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops.

“What is it?” said Myra.

He gazed at it, transfixed.

“That’s a fire ... a big fire.”  Then suddenly his face, in the pale light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted.  He could barely speak.  “It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street.”

She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm.

“Not ... the loft?”

“Oh, it can’t be!” he cried, in an agony.  “But come ... hurry ...”

They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast; and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust, and that the crust had broken and he was falling through.  He turned and spoke harshly: 

“You must run!”

Fear made their feet heavy as they sped, and their hearts seemed to be exploding in their breasts.  They felt as if that fire were consuming them; as if its tongues of flame licked them up.  And so they came to the corner of Eighty-first Street and turned it, and looked, and stopped.

Joe spoke hoarsely.

“It’s burning;... it’s the loft....  The printery’s on fire....”

Beyond the elevated structure at Second Avenue the loft building rose like a grotesque gigantic torch in the night.  Swirls of flame rolled from the upper three stories upward in a mane of red, tossing volumes of smoke, and the wild wind, combing the fire from the west, rained down cinders and burned papers on Joe and Myra as they rushed up the street.  Every window was blankly visible in the extreme light, streams of water played on the walls, and the night throbbed with the palpitating, pounding fire-engines.

And it seemed to Joe as if life were torn to bits, as if the world’s end had come.  It was unbelievable, impossible—­his eyes belied his brain.  That all those years of labor and dream and effort were going up in flame and smoke seemed preposterous.  And only a few moments before he and Myra had stood on the heights of the world; had their mad moment; and even then his life was being burned away from him.  He felt the hoarse sobs lifting up through his throat.

They reached Second Avenue, and were stopped by the vast swaying crowd of people, a density that could not be cloven.  They went around about it frantically; they bore along the edge of the crowd, beside the houses; they wedged past one stoop; they were about to get past the next, when, in the light of the lamp, Joe saw a strange sight.  Crouched on that stoop, with clothes torn, with hair loosed down her back, her face white, her lips gasping, sat one of the hat factory girls.  It was Fannie Lemick.  Joe knew her.  And no one seemed to notice her.  The crowd was absorbed in other things.