The greetings of the other cities he had known—­their homespun kindliness, their human gamut of rough charity, friendly curses, garrulous curiosity and easily estimated credulity or indifference.  This city of Manhattan gave him no clue; it was walled against him.  Like a river of adamant it flowed past him in the streets.  Never an eye was turned upon him; no voice spoke to him.  His heart yearned for the clap of Pittsburg’s sooty hand on his shoulder; for Chicago’s menacing but social yawp in his ear; for the pale and eleemosynary stare through the Bostonian eyeglass—­even for the precipitate but unmalicious boot-toe of Louisville or St. Louis.

On Broadway Raggles, successful suitor of many cities, stood, bashful, like any country swain.  For the first time he experienced the poignant humiliation of being ignored.  And when he tried to reduce this brilliant, swiftly changing, ice-cold city to a formula he failed utterly.  Poet though he was, it offered him no color similes, no points of comparison, no flaw in its polished facets, no handle by which he could hold it up and view its shape and structure, as he familiarly and often contemptuously had done with other towns.  The houses were interminable ramparts loopholed for defense; the people were bright but bloodless spectres passing in sinister and selfish array.

The thing that weighed heaviest on Raggles’s soul and clogged his poet’s fancy was the spirit of absolute egotism that seemed to saturate the people as toys are saturated with paint.  Each one that he considered appeared a monster of abominable and insolent conceit.  Humanity was gone from them; they were toddling idols of stone and varnish, worshipping themselves and greedy for though oblivious of worship from their fellow graven images.  Frozen, cruel, implacable, impervious, cut to an identical pattern, they hurried on their ways like statues brought by some miracles to motion, while soul and feeling lay unaroused in the reluctant marble.

Gradually Raggles became conscious of certain types.  One was an elderly gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled face and stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in the fashion of a gilded youth, who seemed to personify the city’s wealth, ripeness and frigid unconcern.  Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful, clear as a steel engraving, goddess-like, calm, clothed like the princesses of old, with eyes as coldly blue as the reflection of sunlight on a glacier.  And another was a by-product of this town of marionettes—­a broad, swaggering, grim, threateningly sedate fellow, with a jowl as large as a harvested wheat field, the complexion of a baptized infant and the knuckles of a prize-fighter.  This type leaned against cigar signs and viewed the world with frapped contumely.

A poet is a sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shrivelled in the bleak embrace of the undecipherable.  The chill, sphinx-like, ironical, illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left him downcast and bewildered.  Had it no heart?  Better the woodpile, the scolding of vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly spleen of bartenders behind provincial free-lunch counters, the amiable truculence of rural constables, the kicks, arrests and happy-go-lucky chances of the other vulgar, loud, crude cities than this freezing heartlessness.