III. Nine Days' Wonder
The sun's moved to Jersey, the sun's behind Hoboken.
Covers are clicking on typewriters, rolltop desks are closing; elevators go up empty, come down jammed. It's ebbtide in the downtown district, flood in Flatbush, Woodlawn, Dyckman Street, Sheepshead Bay, New Lots Avenue, Canarsie.
Pink sheets, green sheets, gray sheets, FULL MARKET REPORTS, FINALS ON HAVRE DE GRACE. Print squirms among the shop-worn officeworn sagging faces, sore fingertips, aching insteps, strongarm men cram into subway expresses. SENATORS 8, GIANTS 2, DIVA RECOVERS PEARLS, $800,000 ROBBERY.
It's ebbtide on Wall Street, floodtide in the Bronx.
The sun's gone down in Jersey.
" GODAMIGHTY," shouted Phil Sandbourne and pounded with his fist on the desk, "I don't think so. . . . A man's morals arent anybody's business. It's his work that counts."
"Well?"
"Well I think Stanford White has done more for the city of New York that any other man living. Nobody knew there was such a thing as architecture before he came. . . . And to have this Thaw shoot him down in cold blood and then get away with it. . . . By gad if the people of this town had the spirit of guineapigs they'd"
"Phil you're getting all excited over nothing." The other man took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned back in his swivel chair and yawned.
"Oh hell I want a vacation. Golly it'll be good to get out in those old Maine woods again."
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