But Mr. Loewenfeld had spoken no more than the truth.  Broadway at night, seen as a pedestrian at the side of Miss Secker, was astonishing, was marvellous, was unique.  The whole sky was alight and pulsing with its magnificence.  Twenty moons would not have been noticed.  Everything that could happen was happening by electricity.  It was Crystal Palace Fireworks, and the Lord Mayor’s Show, and Coronation, and Mafeking, and naval manoeuvres with searchlights, all flashing and flaming, blazing and gyrating at the same time.  Broadway gleamed white as the north pole, jewelled with rainbow colours, amazing rubies, emeralds, topazes, grouped in letters or forming pictures on invisible frames rising high above tall buildings or appearing on their facades.

Green sea waves billowed brightly, a giant cat winked golden eyes, two brilliant boxers fought an endless round, a dazzling girl put on and took off illuminated gloves; a darky’s head, as big as a balloon, ate a special brand of pickled melon; a blue umbrella opened and shut; a great gilded basket dropped ruby roses (Buy them at Perrin Freres); a Japanese Geisha, twice life-size, told you where to get kimonos; a trout larger than a whale appeared and disappeared on a patent hook; and above all, brighter than all, rose against the paling sky from somewhere behind Broadway a pair of titanic hands.

These hands fascinated Win.  They beckoned her gaze and held it.  Slowly they came up and drew attention to themselves, silently filching it from Broadway’s emblems of business success.  The stranger in New York stopped involuntarily as if hypnotized, watching for the ten colossal outspread fingers to materialize on their unseen frames; to become hands, with wrists and upraised arms; and then to drop out of sight, like the last appeal for help of a drowning Atlas who had lost his grip on the globe.

Yet this immense, arresting gesture was never the last.  Three seconds gone, then blazing back again, came fingers, hands, wrists, arms.  And on every one of the ten fingers (including thumbs) flashed a huge ring, each different from the other in colour and design.  Each ring was adorned with a jewelled letter, and as the hands reached toward the zenith the colour of the rings changed rapidly twice.  It was impossible to remove the eyes from this sign until the gesture pageant had completed itself.  To the lost dryad New York seemed dominated by Peter Rolls’s Hands.

CHAPTER VII

THE TWO PETERS

The hands of Peter Rolls!

They had Winifred Child’s imagination in their grip.  Sleeping and waking, she saw the glitter of their rings.  For on her first night in New York Mr. Loewenfeld told her a story about the hands.

They were the hands of Peter senior.  His commercial genius had spread them across the sky to beckon the public to his great new department store on Sixth Avenue.  Just as at the beginning of the gesture you saw only the tips of the fingers, so Peter Rolls, Sr., had begun with a tiny flicker, the first groping of his inspiration feeling its way to success.