And only a little
further away still, the body itself--the huge city, throbbing
beneath its pall of smoke and cloud. The girl, who had been
gazing steadily downwards for several moments, turned at last to
her companion.
"Do you know," she said, "that this makes me think of the first
night you spoke to me? You remember it--up on the roof at
Blenheim House?"
Tavernake did not answer for a moment. He was looking through a
queerly-shaped instrument that he had brought with him at
half-a-dozen stakes that he had laboriously driven into the
ground some distance away. He was absolutely absorbed in his
task.
"The main avenue," he muttered softly to himself. "Yes, it must
be a trifle more to the left. Then we get all the offshoots
parallel and the better houses have their southern aspect. I beg
your pardon, Beatrice, did you say anything?" he broke off
suddenly.
She smiled.
"Nothing worth mentioning. I was just thinking that it reminded
me a little up here of the first time you and I ever talked
together."
He glanced down at the panorama below, with its odd jumble of
hideous buildings, softened here and there with wreaths of
sunstained smoke, its great blots of ugliness irredeemable,
insistent.
"It's different, of course," she went on. "I remember, even now,
the view from the house-top that night. In a sense, it was finer
than this; everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one
simply felt that underneath all those mysterious places was some
great being, toiling and struggling--Life itself, groaning
through space with human cogwheels.
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