New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed.
Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm
of tired, magpie girls from a department-store crowded along with shrieks
of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching policemen
passed, already miraculously protected by oilskin capes.
The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous unpleasant
aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening
procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway--the car
cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab
your arm with another story; the querulous worry as to whether some one
isn't leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman,
hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a
squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the
smells of the food men ate--at best just people--too hot or too cold,
tired, worried.
He pictured the rooms where these people lived--where the patterns of
the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and
yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways
and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even
love dressed as seduction--a sordid murder around the corner, illicit
motherhood in the flat above.
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