Children of the Whirlwind is a novel by Leroy Scott. It opens in a narrow, cobbled city street by the East River, introducing Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard and suggesting that ordinary beginnings can grow into profound human drama. Worth listening for its atmospheric portrait of city life and sympathetic attention to unremarkable lives.
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Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
CHILDREN OF THE WHIRLWIND
By Leroy Scott
CHAPTER I
It was an uninspiring bit of street: narrow, paved with cobble; hot and noisy in summer, reeking with unwholesome mud during the drizzling and snow-slimed months of winter.
It looked anything this May after noon except a startingplace for drama. But, then, the great dramas of life often avoid the splendid estates and trappings with which conventional romance would equip them, and have their beginnings in unlikeliest environment; and thence sweep on to a noble, consuming tragedy, or to a glorious unfolding of souls. Life is a composite of contradictions—a puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its graceful purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead lion putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a storehouse of wild honey. We are too accustomed to
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