II

The train roared through the subway, that warm typhoon whipping light summer dresses in a multitudinous flutter.  All down the bright crowded aisle of patient humanity I could see their blowing colours.

My eyes were touched with Truth:  I saw them as they are, beautiful and brave.

Is Time never sated with loveliness?  How many million such he has devoured, and must he take these, too?  They are so young, so slender, so untutored, such unconscious vessels of amazing life; so courageous in their simple finery, so unaware of the Enemy that waits for us all.  With what strange cruelties will he trouble them, their very gayety a temptation to his hand?  See them on Broadway at the lunch hour, pouring in their vivacious thousands onto the pavement.  Is there no one who wonders about these merry little hostages?  Can you look on them without marvelling at their gallant mien?

They are aware of their charms, but unconscious of their loveliness.  Surely they are a new generation of their sex, cool, assured, even capable.  They are happy, because they do not think too much; they are lovely, because they are so perishable, because (despite their naive assumption of certainty) one knows them so delightfully only an innocent ornament of this business world of which they are so ignorant.  They are the cheerful children of Down Town, and Down Town looks upon them with the affectionate compassion children merit.  Their joys, their tragedies, are the emotions of children—­all the more terrible for that reason.

And so you see them, day after day, blithely and gallantly faring onward in this Children’s Crusade.  Can you see that caravan of life without a pang?  For many it is tragic to be young and beautiful and a woman.  Luckily, they do not know it, and they never will.  But in courage, and curiosity, and loveliness, how they put us all to shame.  I see them, flashing by in a subway train, golden sphinxes, whose riddles (as Mr. Cabell said of Woman) are not worth solving.  Yet they are all the more appealing for that fact.  For surely to be a riddle which is not worth solving, and still is cherished as a riddle, is the greatest mystery of all.  What strange journeys lie before them, and how triumphantly they walk the precipices as though they were mere meadow paths.

My eyes were touched with Truth, and I saw them as they are, beautiful and brave.  And sometimes I think that even Time must be sated with loveliness; that he will not crumble them or mar their gallant childishness; that he will leave them, their bright dresses fluttering, as I have seem them in the subway many a summer day.

      [Illustration]

DEMPSEY vs.  CARPENTIER