So the newspaper reporter decided to wait awhile before he wrote his story--wait, at least, until he had found out something. But the next day, while he was walking in Michigan Avenue, the idea he had had about the mirror trotted along beside him like some homeless Hector pup that he couldn't shake. He looked up eagerly into the faces of the crowd on the street, searching the many different eyes that moved by him for a "lead." What the newspaper reporter wanted was to be able to begin his fiction story by saying something like this: "People are so and so. The city is so and so. Everybody feels this and this. No matter who they are or where they live, or what their jobs are they can't escape the mark of the city that is on them." It was after 7 o'clock and the people in Michigan Avenue were going home or sauntering back and forth, looking into the shop windows, with nothing much to do. The street was still light, although the sun had gone. Hidden behind the buildings of the city, the sun flattened itself out on an invisible horizon and spread a vast peacock tail of color across the sky. In Grant Park, opposite the Public Library, men lay on their backs with their hands folded under their heads and stared up into the colors of the sky. The newspaper reporter stood abstractedly on the corner counting the automobiles that purred by to see if more taxicabs than privately owned cars passed a given point in Michigan Avenue. Then he walked across the street for no other reason than that there were for the moment no more automobiles to count. He stopped on the opposite pavement and stood looking at the figures that lay on the grass in Grant Park. * * * * * The newspaper reporter had been lying for ten minutes on his back in the grass when he sat up suddenly and muttered: "Here it is. Right in front of me." He sat, looking intently, at the men who were lying on the grass as he had been a moment before. And his idea about the city's being a mirror giving him back images of himself started up again in his mind. But now he could find out what these images of himself were. In fact, what he was. Whereupon he would have his story. Being a newspaper reporter there was nothing unusual in his mind about walking up to one of the figures and talking to it. For years and years he had done just that for a living--walked up to strangers and asked them questions. So now he would ask the men lying on their backs what they were lying on their backs for. He would ask them why they came to Grant Park, what they were thinking about and how it happened that they all looked alike and lay on their backs like a chorus of figures in a pastoral musical comedy.