A Poor Wise Man | Page 3

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A POOR WISE MAN
by Mary Roberts Rinehart

CHAPTER I
The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened
walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a
gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty.
Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the
river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven and earth. And
again the sun tipped the surrounding hills with gold, while the city lay
buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts of river boats moved
spectrally along.
Sometimes it was ugly, sometimes beautiful, but always the city was
powerful, significant, important. It was a vast melting pot. Through its
gates came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers and those
who would destroy those dreams. From all over the world there came
men who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious and
dumb, carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded by
men with cunning eyes.
Raw material, for the crucible of the city, as potentially powerful as the
iron ore which entered the city by the same gate.
The city took them in, gave them sanctuary, and forgot them. But the
shepherds with the cunning eyes remembered.
Lily Cardew, standing in the train shed one morning early in March,
watched such a line go by. She watched it with interest. She had
developed a new interest in people during the year she had been away.
She had seen, in the army camp, similar shuffling lines of men,

transformed in a few hours into ranks of uniformed soldiers, beginning
already to be actuated by the same motive. These aliens, going by,
would become citizens. Very soon now they would appear on the
streets in new American clothes of extraordinary cut and color, their
hair cut with clippers almost to the crown, and surmounted by derby
hats always a size too small.
Lily smiled, and looked out for her mother. She was suddenly
unaccountably glad to be back again. She liked the smoke and the noise,
the movement, the sense of things doing. And the sight of her mother,
small, faultlessly tailored, wearing a great bunch of violets, and
incongruous in that work-a-day atmosphere, set her smiling again.
How familiar it all was! And heavens, how young she looked! The
limousine was at the curb, and a footman as immaculately turned out as
her mother stood with a folded rug over his arm. On the seat inside lay
a purple box. Lily had known it would be there. They would be
ostensibly from her father, because he had not been able to meet her,
but she knew quite well that Grace Cardew had stopped at the