An hour she walked—­down the cross-town street and a bit along the wide, bright, lighted driveway, its traffic long since died down to an occasional night-prowling cab, a skimming motor-car; then down a flight of curving stone steps with her slightly perceptible limp, and into the ledge of parkway where shadows took her into their velvet silence; down a second flight, across a railroad track, and to the water’s edge, where a great coal-station ran a jut of pier out into the river.  She could walk its length, feeling it sway to the heavy tug of current.

Out at the very edge the water washed up against the piles with a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be understood from the under side.

THE NAME AND THE GAME

At Christmas-tide men and women with soiled lives breathe alcoholic sighs and dare to glance back into the dim corridors of their long agos.

Cronies, snug in an age of steam heat, turn their warm backs upon to-day, swap white-Christmas stories, and hanker with forefinger laid alongside of nose for the base-burners and cold backs of the good old days.

Not least upon the busy magnate’s table is his shopping-list.

Evenings, six-dollar-a-week salesgirls sit in their five-dollar-a-week hall-bedrooms, with their aching feet in a tub of hot water and their aching fingers busy with baby-ribboned coat-hangers and silk needle-book tokens of Yuletide affection.

Even as it flowered in a manger the Christmas spirit, a perennial lily upon the sooty face of the world, blooms out of the slack heap of men’s rife and strife.

In the hearts of children it is a pod filled with their first happiness.

Down from a sky the color of cold dish-water a cloak of swift snow fell upon the city, muffling its voice like a hand held against its mouth.  Children who had never before beheld a white Christmas leaped with the joy of it.  A sudden army of men with blue faces and no overcoats sprang full-grown and armed with shovels, from out the storm.  City parks lay etched in sudden finery.  Men coming up out of the canon of Wall Street remembered that it was Christmas and felt for bauble money.

At early dusk and through the white dance of the white storm the city slid its four million packs off its four million backs and turned homeward.  Pedestrians with the shopper’s light in their eyes bent into the flurry and darted for surface cars and subways.  Commuters, laden with bundles and with tickets between their teeth, rushed for early trains.

Women with bearing-down bundles and babies wedged through the crowd, fighting for trains and place.  Boys in cadet uniforms and boarding-school girls, homeward bound, thrust forward their shining faces as if into the to-morrow.  A tight tangle of business men passed single file through a trellised gateway and on down to a lower level.  A messenger with a tipsy spray of holly stuck upright in his cap whacked with a folded newspaper at a fellow-messenger’s swift legs and darted in and around the knees of the crowd.  A prodigal hesitated, then bought a second-class ticket for home.  Two nuns hurried softly on missions of Christmas.