Book Two Chapter 10 Morton Sends a Telegram

The harsh reality of the outside world was like the hard-driven, acrid spray of the ocean in a wintry storm, it stung yet calmed with its grateful, stern menace. A thin drizzle of rain was beginning to fall, and the avenues were filled with the furious clamor of belated traffic. The clangor of the overhead trains--almost incessant at this hour--benumbed the ear, and every side-street rang with the hideous clatter of drays and express-carts, each driver, each motor-man, laboring in a kind of sullen frenzy to reach his barn before six o'clock, while truculent pedestrians, tired, eager, and exacting, trod upon one another's heels in their homeward haste.

This tumult of turbulent, coarse, unthinking life seemed at the moment not merely normal but wholesome and admirable by force of contrast with the morbid, unnatural, and useless scenes through which he had just passed. Better to be a burly, unreflecting truckman than a troubled, unresting soul like Anthony Clarke, "Yes, and better for Viola Lambert to be the wife of one of these rude animal types, suffering a life of physical hardship, than to continue the sport of a man who, having lost the true values out of his own life, is remorselessly distorting those of the woman he professes to love."

His mind then went back, by the same law of contrast, to his momentous ride across the Sulphur Spring trail. "To think on how small a chance my share in this girl's singular history hangs! Had I taken 'the cut-off,' as my guide suggested, had I camped in the log-cabin at the head of the cañon, or had I saddled up the next morning and ridden over to Silver City, as I had planned, we would never have met; and I would not now be involved in her hysterical career."