The Human Desire (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ... VI THE WORLD A sharp frost, laggard remnant of the hard winter, set in about dusk, after a day of drizzling rain, threatening to turn the March evening into a record nightmare of privation and suffering. By seven o'clock, Fifth Avenue went its way cautiously in motors, inconvenienced but not yet routed; while Harlem and the suburbs shivered on foot their various roads, from "subway" and "elevated " to apartment houses, not entirely unmindful of the misery on the East-side. In a couple of hours' time the streets were well nigh impassable, and traffic dropped away early, the going become too hazardous for either horse or man. Women wise in the vagaries of the American climate had taken the first car home when the frost began. And unfortunate males still at large walked heedfully, feeling their way, with hand on wall or paling, for the innocent looking wet pavements were in fact, death traps of thin, glare ice, and a gusty wind swirling unexpectedly about the corners of tall buildings made all progress a wild uncertainty. Perfectly respectable citizens clung frantically to lamp posts for support, or exhausted, sought the shelter of doorways, hoping for luck in the form of a passing conveyance. Even the despised hansom, though doubly insecure, was welcome, for locomotion grew a more and more serious problem. Motor vehicles, obliged to creep at a snail's pace, were unable to make the requisite number of trips; discreet owners of horse flesh drove their animals to early shelter; the "elevated" ran intermittently on ice crusted rails; surface cars had long before given up under like difficulties; and the whole effort of belated humanity turned toward gaining the "subway" stations. The temperature, various as the moods of a spoiled woman, presently relented and a ...