business man. He, too, then had his other side. For him the Battle
of the Street was an exhilaration. Beneath that boyish exterior was
the tough coarseness, the male hardness, the callousness that met
the brunt and withstood the shock of onset.

Ah, these men of the city, what could women ever know of them, of
their lives, of that other existence through which--freed from the
influence of wife or mother, or daughter or sister--they passed
every day from nine o'clock till evening? It was a life in which
women had no part, and in which, should they enter it, they would no
longer recognise son or husband, or father or brother. The
gentle-mannered fellow, clean-minded, clean-handed, of the breakfast
or supper table was one man. The other, who and what was he? Down
there in the murk and grime of the business district raged the
Battle of the Street, and therein he was a being transformed, case
hardened, supremely selfish, asking no quarter; no, nor giving any.
Fouled with the clutchings and grapplings of the attack, besmirched
with the elbowing of low associates and obscure allies, he set his
feet toward conquest, and mingled with the marchings of an army that
surged forever forward and back; now in merciless assault, beating
the fallen enemy under foot, now in repulse, equally merciless,
trampling down the auxiliaries of the day before, in a panic dash
for safety; always cruel, always selfish, always pitiless.

To contrast these men with such as Corthell was inevitable. She
remembered him, to whom the business district was an unexplored
country, who kept himself far from the fighting, his hands
unstained, his feet unsullied. He passed his life gently, in the
calm, still atmosphere of art, in the cult of the beautiful,
unperturbed, tranquil; painting, reading, or, piece by piece,