West said that evidently her conception of a holiday was badly mixed. As
they walked he paid for her society by incessantly taking off his hat;
nearly everybody they met spoke to them, many more to him than to her.
Though both of them had been born in that city and grown up with it, the
girl had only lately come to know West well, and she did not know him
very well now. All the years hitherto she had joined in the general
admiration of him shyly and from a distance, the pretty waiting-lady's
attitude toward the dazzling young crown prince. She was observant, and
so she could not fail to observe now the cordiality with which people of
all sorts saluted him, the touch of deference in the greeting of not a
few. He was scarcely thirty, but it would have been clear to a duller
eye that he was already something of a personage. Yet he held no public
office, nor were his daily walks the walks of philanthropic labor for
the common good. In fact Semple & West's was merely a brokerage
establishment, which was understood to be cleaning up a tolerable lot of
money per annum.
They stood on the corner, waiting for a convenient chance to cross, and
West looked at her as at one whom it was pleasant to rest one's eyes
upon. She drew his attention to their humming environment. For a city of
that size the life and bustle here were, indeed, such as to take the
eye. Trolley cars clanged by in a tireless procession; trucks were
rounding up for stable and for bed; delivery wagons whizzed corners and
bumped on among them; now and then a chauffeur honked by, grim eyes
roving for the unwary pedestrian. On both sides of the street the
homeward march of tired humans was already forming and quickening.
"Heigho! We're living in an interesting time, you and I," said West. "It
isn't every generation that can watch its old town change into a
metropolis right under its eyes."
"I remember," said she, "when it was an exciting thing to see anybody on
the street you didn't know. You went home and told the family about it,
and very likely counted the spoons next morning. The city seemed to
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