Can it lift you up on its shoulders, as ifyou were a hero, can it whoopsie-daisy you up into its arms as ifyou were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire?Yes, yes, all that and more.The world can crush you with its beauty.

Back in the city, Daniel’s firm had offices that took three floors in a styl-ishArt Deco building on LexingtonAvenue, with astrological mosaics in the lobby, and arte moderne numerals over the filigreed brass elevator doors.But here in Leyden his place ofwork is as humble as his practice, two rooms in a wood-framed building near the center oftown.It’s an ungraceful, stolid sort ofbuilding, the architectural equivalent ofa schoolmarm, a nun, a maiden aunt;it once had been, in fact, a board-inghouse, from1925to1960,owned by two musical, free-thinking German sisters, and run exclusively for local unmarried women—gen-teel shop-women, schoolteachers, and a woman named Marjorie Inger-soll, who had a small private income that she supplemented by giving painting and drawing lessons, and whose cheerful landscapes, with their agitated skies and roller coaster hills and valleys, are still displayed along the stairways and in the hallways.Now, the house has been turned into an office complex, where Daniel rents a two-room suite, where century-old locust trees scrape their branches against the windows at the wind’s slightest provocation.Eight hundred and fifty dollars a month, which back in the city would get him thirty square feet in Staten Island.

Daniel climbs the back stairs to the second floor, so lost in thought as he replays and what-ifs this morning’s meeting with Iris that he forgets today’s first appointment