Whatever he may have read in Allan at those times when the look of cold appraisement was turned full upon him, he had come to know of his brother's wife only that she was Nancy of the old days, strangely surviving to greet him and be silent with him, or to wonder with him when he came in out of that preposterous machine of many wheels that they called the town.

No one but Nancy saw anything about it to wonder at.
To Bernal, after his years in the big empty places, it was a part of all the world and of all times compacted in a small space.

One might see in it ancient Jerusalem, Syria, Persia, Rome and modern Babylon--with something still peculiar and unclassifiable that one would at length have to call New York.

And to make it more absorbing, the figures were always moving.

Where so many were pressed together each was weighted by a thousand others--the rich not less than the poor; each was stirred to quick life and each was being visibly worn down by the ceaseless friction.
When he had walked the streets for a week, he saw the city as a huge machine, a machine to which one might not even deliver a message without becoming a part of it--a wheel of it.