The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

When they stopped in Jersey City, Ray made haste out of the car to see / what became of his beneficiaries, and he followed closely after them, / and got near them on the ferry-boat. They went forward out of the cabin / and stood among the people at the bow who were eager to get ashore / first. They each held her heavy baby, and silently watched the New York / shore, and scarcely spoke.

Ray looked at it too, with a sense of the beauty struggling through the / grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the / grossest details. The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges / with freight trains in sections on them; the canal-boats in tow of the / river steamers; the shabby sloops slouching by with their sails / half-filled by the flagging breeze; the ships lying at anchor in the / stream, and wooding the shore with their masts, which the coastwise / steamboats stared out of like fantastic villas, all window-shutters and / wheel-houses; the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, / and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and / clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the / necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the / brutal and stupid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively / expressed in an incredible picturesqueness. Ray saw nothing amiss in it. / This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of / the warring interests within them, did not repulse him. He was not / afraid. He took a new grip of the travelling-bag where he had his / manuscript, so that he should not be parted from it for a moment till it / went into some publisher's keeping. He would not trust it to the trunk / which he had checked at Midland, and which he now recognized among the / baggage piled on a truck near him. He fingered the outside of his bag to / make sure by feeling its shape that his manuscript was all right within.

All the time he was aware of those two young women, each with her baby / in her arms, which they amused with various devices, telling them to / look at the water, the craft going by, and the horses in the wagon-way / of the ferry-boat. The children fretted, and pulled the women's hair, / and clawed their hats; and the passengers now and then looked / censoriously at them. From time to time the young women spoke to each / other spiritlessly. The one whose child had thrown her pocket-book away / never lost a look of hopeless gloom, as she swayed her body half round / and back, to give some diversion to the baby. Both were pretty, but she / had the paleness and thinness of young motherhood; the other, though she / was thin too, had the fresh color and firm texture of a young girl; she / was at once less tragic and more serious than her sister, if it was her / sister. When she found Ray gazing fixedly at her, she turned discreetly / away, after a glance that no doubt took in the facts of his neat, / slight, rather undersized person; his regular face, with its dark eyes / and marked brows; his straight fine nose and pleasant mouth; his / sprouting black moustache, and his brown tint, flecked with a few / browner freckles.

He was one of those men who have no vanity concerning their persons; he / knew he was rather handsome, but he did not care; his mind was on other / things. When he found those soft woman-eyes lingering a moment on him he / had the wish to please their owner, of course, but he did not think of / his looks, or the effect they might have with her. He fancied knowing / her well enough to repeat poetry to her, or of reading some favorite / author aloud with her, and making her sympathize in his admiration of / the book. He permitted his fancy this liberty because, although he / supposed her married, his fancy safely operated their intellectual / intimacy in a region as remote from experience as the dreamland of / sleep. She and her sister had both a sort of refinement; they were / ladies, he felt, although they were poorly dressed, and they somehow did / not seem as if they had ever been richly dressed. They had not the New / Yorkeress air; they had nothing of the stylishness which Ray saw in the / other women about him, shabby or splendid; their hats looked as if they / had been trimmed at home, and their simple gowns as if their wearers had / invented and made them up themselves, after no decided fashion, but / after a taste of their own, which he thought good. He began to make / phrases about them to himself, and he said there was something / pathetically idyllic about them. The phrase was indefinite, but it was / sufficiently clear for his purpose. The baby which had thrown away the / pocket-book began to express its final dissatisfaction with the / prospect, and its mother turned distractedly about for some new / diversion, when there came from the ladies' cabin a soft whistle, like / the warbling of a bird, low and rich and full, which possessed itself of / the sense to the exclusion of all other sounds. Some of the people / pressed into the cabin; others stood smiling in the benediction of the / artless strain.