No river-ravine of Wheat-Land on a June Sunday had ever stirred Daisy Nixon to an atom of the ecstasy that champagned her as she sailed down that traffic-current between its Saguenay-banks of masonry, whose uneven summits, high above her, scissored the blue silk of the sky. Forward, upward to right, upward to left, the girl's glance travelled; then came down to the sidewalk, no square yard of which escaped for one clear moment from servitude to the thousand thousand tramping feet, following at a slower pace the drift of the traffic in the hundred-foot driving way. No electric welcome blazed from the front of the city hall, with its coal-darkened brickwork and broad steps. No welcome, nor any sound but a mighty hammer-stroke from the tall clock, telling Daisy that Time was moving as well as she. No welcome--but Daisy Nixon felt that there could not help be a quickening of the city's pulse at the notability of this day, with its every moment so rare and thrilling to her. The pulse of the motor throbbed as, coursing in the pack of its kind, it nosed from side to side or held a true-running swift pace astride a tram-rail. The chauffeur, with an air of profound abstraction made comical by his tilted cap and sportive half-presented profile, gave "her" spark or "juice" as the occasion demanded, with a casual motion of his gloved thumb. At a corner where two broad streets met, the taxi-cab turned aside. Proceeding a little way down the second main artery of traffic, it rounded a corner under a brass-grilled jeweler's window and entered a labyrinth of side-streets in which Daisy soon lost her sense of direction so completely that the sun, after what seemed like an excursion into the little-visited due-north sector of the horizon, appeared to move around to the east, and forthwith to commence another day without pausing for the customary night-interval. It was, therefore, according to Daisy's dial, about six-thirty in the morning instead of that hour p.m., when the jitney, doubling adroitly between two great gate-posts of gray masonry, spun along a paved driveway and pulled up before a house so big and ornamental and ostentatious that it filled Daisy with a kind of momentary awe just to look at it.