“Before we go home, there’s one place more.”

And they went to a building not far away, a new structure twelve floors high which rose out of the neighboring tenements.  It had been built, she told him, by a socialist daily paper.  A dull night watchman half asleep took them in the elevator up to the top floor of the building, where in a bustling, clanking loft the paper was just going to press.  Deborah seemed to know one of the foremen.  He smiled and nodded and led the way through the noise and bustle to a large glass door at one end.  This she opened and stepped out upon a fire escape so broad it was more like a balcony.  And with the noise of the presses subdued, from their high perch they looked silently down.

All around them for miles, it seemed, stretched dark uneven fields of roofs, with the narrow East River winding its way through the midst of them to the harbor below, silvery, dim and cool and serene, opening to the distant sea.  From the bridges rearing high over the river, lights by thousands sparkled down.  But directly below the spot where they stood was only a dull hazy glow, rising out of dark tenement streets where dimly they could just make out numberless moving shadowy forms, restless crowds too hot to sleep.  The roofs were covered everywhere with men and women and children—­families, families, families, all merged together in the dark.  And from them rose into the night a ceaseless murmur of voices, laughing and joking, quarreling, loving and hating, demanding, complaining, and fighting and slaving and scheming for bread and the means of stark existence.  But among these struggling multitudes confusedly did Roger feel the brighter presence here and there of more aspiring figures, small groups in glaring, stilling rooms down there beneath the murky dark, young people fiercely arguing, groping blindly for new gods.  And all these voices, to his ears, merged into one deep thrilling hum, these lights into one quivering glow, that went up toward the silent stars.

And there came to him a feeling which he had often had before in many different places—­that he himself was a part of all this, the great, blind, wistful soul of mankind, which had been here before he was born and would be here when he was dead—­still groping, yearning, struggling upward, on and on—­to something distant as the sun.  And still would he be a part of it all, through the eager lives of his children.  He turned and looked at Deborah and caught the light that was in her eyes.

CHAPTER XII

Roger awoke the next morning feeling sore and weary, and later in his office it was hard to keep his mind on his work.  He thought of young Isadore Freedom.  He was glad he had met that boy, and so he felt toward Deborah’s whole terrific family.  Confused and deafening as it was, there was something inspiring in it all.  But God save him from many such evenings!  For half his life Roger had been a collector, not only