So, taking his surveys and reports and a few letters of introduction Keith went to New York.

Only one thought marred Keith’s joy:  the dearest aim he had so long had in view had disappeared.  The triumph of standing before Alice Yorke and offering her the reward of his endeavor was gone.  All he could do was to show her what she had lost.  This he would do; he would win life’s highest honors.  He grew grim with resolve.

Something of this triumphant feeling showed in his mien and in his face as he plunged into the crowded life of the city.  From the time he passed into the throng that streamed up the long platforms of the station and poured into the wide ferry-boats, like grain pouring through a mill, he felt the thrill of the life.  This was what he had striven for.  He would take his place here and show what was in him.

He had forgotten how gay the city life was.  Every place of public resort pleased him:  theatres, hotels, beer-gardens; but best of all the streets.  He took them all in with absolute freedom and delight.

Business was the watchword, the trade-mark.  It buzzed everywhere, from the Battery to the Park.  It thronged the streets, pulsating through the outlets and inlets at ferries and railway-stations and crossings, and through the great buildings that were already beginning to tower in the business sections.  It hummed in the chief centres.  And through it all and beyond it all shone opulence, opulence gilded and gleaming and dazzling in its glitter:  in the big hotels; in the rich shops; in the gaudy theatres; along the fine avenues:  a display of wealth to make the eyes ache; an exhibition of riches never seen before.  It did Keith good at first just to stand in the street and watch the pageant as it passed like a gilded panorama.  Of the inner New York he did not yet know:  the New York of luxurious homes; of culture and of art; of refinement and elegance.  The New York that has grown up since, with its vast wealth, its brazen glitter, its tides that roll up riches as the sea rolls up the sand, was not yet.  It was still in its infancy, a chrysalis as yet sleeping within its golden cocoon.

Keith had no idea there were so many handsome and stylish young women in the world as he now saw.  He had forgotten how handsome the American girl is in her best appointment.  They sailed down the avenue looking as fine as young fillies at a show, or streamed through the best shopping streets as though not only the shops, but the world belonged to them, and it were no longer the meek, but the proud, that inherit the earth.

If in the throngs on the streets there were often marked contrasts, Keith was too exhilarated to remark it—­at least, at first.  If women with worn faces and garments unduly thin in the frosty air, carrying large bundles in their pinched hands, hurried by as though hungry, not only for food, but for time in which to earn food; if sad-eyed men with hollow cheeks, sunken chests, and threadbare clothes shambled eagerly along, he failed to note them in his first keen enjoyment of the pageant.  Old clothes meant nothing where he came from; they might be the badge of perilous enterprise and well-paid industry, and food and fire were at least common to all.