Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/218

When Judy Cronin first saw the topless towers of Manhattan rising into the lilac vagueness of a foggy winter morning she passed into a numb and frightened daze. Standing on the steerage deck of the Celtic, she peered tremulously at those fantastic impossible profiles of stone. Perhaps you don't know what it is to be thrown, ignorant and timid, into a place where everything is utterly strange—particularly a place as huge, violent, and hasty as New York. Judy, aged twenty-one, from a little village near Queenstown, was incapable of distinguishing, in the roaring voice of the city, that undertone of helpful kindness that is really there. On the same steamer came the widow of a famous Irish recusant and hungerstriker, and there were ten thousand people massed in West Street to cheer her. Judy heard the shouts of the crowd, and saw the lines of policemen on the pier. There was some of that quiet but menacing scuffling with which the various branches of the English-speaking world