Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/122

 "but somehow I can't express it. Perhaps the world is n't really as bright and beautiful as it seems to me, but I don't see why I should go out of my way to discover that. The popular idea of 'experience' in the office is evidently to be broken on a wheel a few times. I don't believe my literary style would be improved by that. Besides, I'm horribly afraid of being sentimental or mawkish."

As the car was rounding "Dead Man's Curve," she heard the clang of an ambulance bell and saw a crowd gather thickly in front of one of the buildings in Fourteenth Street. Two large policemen were trying to make way for several white-faced men who were carrying a limp figure into an adjacent hall way. As the ambulance rattled up to the curb and the crowd parted, she saw the great safe which had crashed to the ground and the parted cable that told the story of the accident. She felt a pang of sympathy for the unconscious victim, followed by a sudden faintness as she realized what the tragedy might mean in some New York home. "Fancy what I should suffer if it were John," she breathed.