IN one of those old fairy books that belong to the vivid actualities of childhood is a story which recounts how a girl found herself, to her bitter chagrin, without the easy power to attract that so many of her sisters possessed a power she had grown up to regard as her feminine birthright. Though neither ill-favored nor ill-natured, she was insignificant, apt to be left out; had on social occasions to play the part of wallflower, and did not like it. Desperate, she sought the aid of an Enchanter. The Enchanter, as happens in such tales, had a curious passion for collecting souls. What he did with them no one knew; there, after all, he was like other collectors then and since. As the price of giving the girl power over the eyes and hearts of men he demanded her soul. She hesitated. He told her he would make her beautiful and at the same time different, so that even among beautiful women she would possess something they had not, which would exercise an instant and irresistible fascination. As to the thing she was to part with in exchange, that, he assured her, would never be noticed. He offered to give her red hair - hair that in its brightness held the lustre of the sun, and in its darkness the sombre glow of bronze, shot with mysterious gleams of purple. In a glass he held the image she might see every day and show to others. Finally she agreed to his bargain. She got her red hair, and paid the price put upon it.

This was at one time a parable – but now the time gives it proof. Is not red hair, in a beautiful woman, the final touch of wonder? Does it not lift its possessor up and out above her rivals, render her visibly sister and daughter of the sun? Does it not make even the moderately pretty in form and feature pass as lovely, and to the generously gifted add wonder and excitement? Socially, does it not spell success without effort? Display is superfluous; the red-haired woman has only to be there to be seen. Fashion may change and veer, but red hair is independent of it. Its appeal must tell so long as color continues to move us. When a man says he dislikes it, he is but paying inverted tribute to something primitive in himself which at once thrills him and makes him afraid. When a woman says the same, no one believes her, and rightly not. And yet, behind the fear of the one and the envy of the other, there lurks something deeper, to which neither may be able or willing to give tongue. In some way the red-haired woman is different, and the difference goes deeper than the pigmentation of her hair.

That it is not only the color can easily be proved. No one has ever felt either mystery or attraction in red hair in men. Red-headed boys are described as 'carroty'; red-headed men cut their hair exceptionally short, as if in the hope of concealing it. Judas is supposed to have had it, and

perhaps for that reason - the heroes of sentimental novels are sometimes thus disguised, under a misleading veil of ugliness subsequently withdrawn to reveal more fully the white light of a pure soul. But even then the red hair is not enough in itself; in a man it has no distinct significance - none of the significance it has in a woman.

In her we all know it means something. As to what it means there is, no doubt, little agreement. But I believe that if the red-haired women one knows are submitted to an impartial comparative scrutiny it will be found that there is something, difficult to define, impossible not to feel, which all of them lack. It is the harder to distinguish in that few of them are destitute of attraction; yet the ruthless analysis of close contact will, in nine cases out of ten, bring the attracted up against some ultimate blind spot, some chord that does not sound, some insensitiveness that cannot be moved. Until one gets near, probes deep, cares much, one may not discover it; but as one does one will. There is something inaccessible, something that does not respond, something, above all, that rejects responsibility.

There is a word for this thing the red-haired woman has not got, though it is one that has gone out of fashion and will probably be hailed with contempt. A soul. The red-haired woman has no soul.

Much as we delight to mention the unmentionable and touch the untouchable, we have got frightened of some of the words our ancestors used with a cruel candor. Especially is this the case with the words that indicate, without pretending to analyze or exhaust, spiritual facts and forces. So the word 'soul,' though it still figures, for want of a better, in our vocabularies, makes us shy. We say we do not know what it means. And yet, for all our

cleverness and our superconsciousness, we have evolved no other word that does its work. Sentimentalism may mask realities from us, but there is a thing behind it, nevertheless, which it caricatures, whose absence can be felt, though its outline is hard to draw. Being soulful is not the same thing as having a soul; being selfish is not the same thing as being without one. There are men and women who have souls; there are men and women who have not; and we know them when we meet them. Red-haired women belong to the latter class; and there is no other form of words which will cover their peculiarities except that which declares that they have no souls.

Puzzling things, if they have enough charm to keep us intrigued by the riddle they set us, are still likened to women. It is so with ships, engines, nations, cities. But we have passed away from the days when it could be imagined that to describe a city or anything else as a woman is to tell one much about it. Women are as various as men, and no one has yet succeeded in laying his finger on any single quality common to all women as women, and thereby distinguishing them from men. True things may be said of certain kinds of women as of certain kinds of men not of women as such. Or of cities as such. They are not all charming, any more than are women. Some are, however; and among them none is more richly endowed with both charm and wonder, with that quality which sets one puzzling and keeps one so, than New York. It makes one want to talk; one can no more be restrained from talking about it by one's ignorance than about a beautiful woman, of whose fascination one is afraid, in whose past may be hid some revealing secret. New York need have no fear of its past; its secrets, whether fearful or beautiful, or both, are in the future;

and in talking of it one is constantly impelled to be looking there.

II

As happens when one meets a lovely red-haired woman, fear and admiration mingle in the mind; more than a touch of envy, and, behind that, a hesitating doubt. New York has so much that one boggles at saying that anything is missing; and yet this sense of something missing will persist. Behind wonder, admiration, envy, dread, the mind fumbles for the clue that may relate them, and can neither find it nor cease from searching.

More than any other city in the world, New York is an embodied question mark. The approach from overseas presents this aspect vividly. No other thrusts itself, with such arrogant and challenging beauty, right upon one. To others one comes gradually, out of stations, through tunnels, across country, from amid a bewilderment of docks and wharves. Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Budapest, have aspects as remarkable, which can be found. In each case, however, they need finding. New York is there. One comes upon a thing defined, rounded off, from the start. What one sees across the water is not an aspect; it is the city as it remains. Looking expectantly over the bay, one watches the great buildings rising, high enough, assured enough in outline, arresting enough in design and combination, to tell even against its superb sweep. There, facing one, is an image that persists and is genuinely symbolic of what is to come. On the very threshold one is confronted by a picture composed, not by the accidental beauties of situation and atmosphere, but by the resolute will of man, of which it is the expression. The situation, of course, is always there, but on nine days out of ten there is, in

our European sense, little or no atmosphere. The lines are etched on an air of crystalline clearness, blue and white. Unveiled, the city looks at one.

Before it one shrinks, dwindles, quails. One grows smaller and smaller as it looms up before one. Questions, thoughts, preconceptions, are overpowered; judgment is dominated; standards are pushed aside. Here is the not-self multiplied and aggrandized to the point of terror; here is something one could not have imagined and does not understand. It is not only that one sinks and shrinks under sheer size, height, mass, and solidity of specification, though that plays its part; the element of fear is driven home by the awful authority of rectilinear pattern and perpetual right angles. Evasion is impossible. The fluid mind is seized and held in the clamp of geometric design. Things rise up, before one, around one, above one; they are there

more than one is one's self. One is a mere rounded bundle of softness; they have risen out of the water, out of the earth, in a form that asserts, at every turn, an alien dominance. The ordinary subterfuges of dismissal and equivocation fail. Even the æsthetic canon betrays, for, with a final turn of the screw, the beauty of these strange structures overwhelms, and a perverse delight is mingled with one's terror. For they have beauty, a new beauty, fearsome as that of the Pyramids, because, like theirs, it seems to be at once the supreme expression and the supreme denial of human will.

Nature, time, the slow accumulating pressure of event and experience, have made the capitals of Europe. New York has made itself. Under one's eyes it is remaking itself. Buildings here do not change or decay. Overnight they are torn down; next morning new erections are rising in their places, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane.'

They have the right to rise; the right of their fresh compelling beauty. Architecture is the proudest of the arts; nowhere is its pride so salient as in New York. It sets endless questions, but knows none. Men have heaped these stones one upon another, climbing to the sky; one can watch the gangs of Italians, transformed out of their Latin dolce far niente, subdued to what they work in, creating towers high as that of Babel; and one asks, as one watches, at what point the creature becomes the creator. Men have made this city, but it seems, in the very act of being created, to deny them significance. The scurrying lines of indistinguishable atoms moving under the shadow of the skyscrapers seem their servants rather than their masters. The triumph of matter is complete. Soaring stone, glass, concrete, steel, make a sounding screen for the metallic clangor of the streets, and this clangor drives into the nerves and makes part of their tissue the sense of the control of things over the puny human spirit.

Our world is ruled by capitalism. Elsewhere one feels its shadow. New York gives the thing itself. In other cities the impression is broken and refracted by the brooding atmosphere of the past; in New York it is continuous and direct. In other cities one can escape; in New York there is no escape. Mechanics enclose and dominate. The comparisons to which its citizens are markedly addicted tend always to be expressed in terms of things. To ask about anything is to be told that there is more of it here than in any other city of the globe. Very soon it becomes impossible to resist the trick of quantitative analysis. It is only by a clutch at older habits of thought that one remembers the existence of elements in life that cannot be so weighed and summed up. Let a thing be a thing and one can find it here.

'Finding' is, indeed, an inappropriate word in this connection. New York does nothing by stealth. Beauty flaunts, too magnificently sure of itself for vulgarity in the ordinary sense. Look at the gold, green, and purple of the Radiator Building, seen against the thick blues of the night sky; or the wonder of the myriad lighted windows of the vast office or apartment blocks. So does ugliness. I am not thinking of the jazz decorations of Broadway, -for which there is much to be said, but of the squalor of the avenues east and west of the central oblong of which one thinks when one says New York, though it is in fact but a small segment of the city. Nothing picturesque in the broken pavements, the slush and garbage heaped up against the supports of the Elevated, or the mean and ragged outline of the houses into whose windows one stares as one passes along. In Europe poverty and misery are, in the main, in hiding. Not so here. Here nothing hides. New York does not deal in secrets or in silence. There is the story of the multimillionaire who, in order to find it, had to construct for himself a soundproof chamber in the heart of an immense building. For the ordinary man the only discoverable silence is the silence of his own soul. Loneliness, of course, there is; but privacy is a more difficult achievement where gregariousness is the ruling note.

The universal and, to the English visitor, the uncomfortable open door is the formal intimation of the habit of publicity. To work in an island of plate glass; to talk with the door thrown wide- that, for us, is awkward. True, the drafts that threaten from the chilly English passages have no terrors in the steam-heated house; but the difficulty is not merely one of temperature. To us the 'settling down' that belongs to an intimate and truly social atmosphere is hardly possible

when the open door offers its perpetual suggestion of coming and going. Also, most of us like, at times, not only to be alone, but to be secure against incursion. New York gives its inhabitants endless opportunities of escaping from themselves, comparatively few for escaping from one another.

III

Neither capitalism, the dominance of mechanics, nor an emphasized gregariousness distinguishes New York, except in degree, from other capital cities. Something does, however. I feel her a red-haired city because of this something which insists on being felt while it evades description. In the effort to describe it one searches one's impressions. In that process some curiosities emerge which demand fuller analysis than can here be given. In its default one takes freedom to be crudely dogmatic. Speaking thus, I find New York lacking in what, as measured against the European capitals, may be called the sex atmosphere. Publicity of reference has an ambiguous result. The thing is there, of course; but not its aroma. What used to be called the 'secrets of the toilette' fill an extraordinarily high proportion of every advertisement column; sky signs reveal them and they are shown in action daily in restaurant and train. Women are instructed, in screaming capitals, how they may get rid of superfluous hair and superfluous fat; men are reminded that bad-smelling breath or the signs of dandruff on the coat collar may lose them executive positions. Cosmetics dominate the magazines. There is no detail of marital familiarity that is not canvassed with entire frankness, from birth to death. Ingenious morticians appeal to the 'prospective widow' to select the last home for her partner with his assistance now. As in

Europe, the theatre, the movie, the novel, and the newspaper are perpetually preoccupied with sex, but here the terms of this preoccupation are of a distinguished explicitness, a most arresting naïveté, and as a consequence the sex atmosphere is not there. Take one illustrative phenomenon. What is known in England as the 'glad eye' is almost never cast. One could live for days in the subway or the street without meeting it. The business to which the 'glad eye' is the invitation exists, but it has its own time, its own place. It is provided for, scheduled, organized. It is there, but its atmosphere is not. New York has its night life, planned, like the day life, in a high glare of publicity, but, for good or evil, there is nothing of the glamour of sex that floats in and out of the air of Paris, Vienna, London, Brussels, or even Berlin. Look at the novel, that sensitive thermometer of social temperature, and you will find the sex adventure there reduced to its lowest common measure of explicitness; a story, essentially, of swift and swiftly sated possession, not of pursuit.

Woman dominates New York, but hers is a curious kind of dominance. She is without her most dangerous weapons. Mystery, glamour, and romance belong, if they belong anywhere, to business, not to sex. The fastnesses of the city, its controlling nerve ganglia, are immune from her interference. Woman may be seen in Wall Street, but she does not count as a disturbing force. She dominates the city, but she is not its centre, not the substance of its dreams.

But when one is comparing the impression made by New York with that made by the capitals of Europe one must note another difference in atmosphere that certainly goes far deeper than the presence, or absence, of a romantic sense of sex; deeper, even, than the division that separates the