Women with bearing-down bundles and babies wedged through the crowd, fighting for trains and place. Boys in cadet uniforms and boarding-school girls, homeward bound, thrust forward their shining faces as if into the to-morrow. A tight tangle of business men passed single file through a trellised gateway and on down to a lower level. A messenger with a tipsy spray of holly stuck upright in his cap whacked with a folded newspaper at a fellow-messenger's swift legs and darted in and around the knees of the crowd. A prodigal hesitated, then bought a second-class ticket for home. Two nuns hurried softly on missions of Christmas. The low thunder of a thousand feet: tired feet, eager feet; flat feet; shabby feet; young feet; callous feet; arched and archless feet. Voices that rose like wind to a gale. A child dragged by the arm and whimpering. A group of shawled strangers interchanging sharp jargon. Within the marble mausoleum of a waiting-room, its benches lined with the kaleidoscopic faces of the traveling public, a train-announcer bellowed a paean of tracks and stations. At the onyx-and-nickel-plated periodical stand men in passing snatched their evening paper from off the stack of the counter, flopping down their pennies as they ran. In the glow of a spray of red and white electric bulbs, in a bower of the instant's pretty-girl periodical covers, and herself the most vivid of them all, Miss Marjorie Clark caught a hastily flung copper coin on the fly, her laughter mounting with it. "Whoops, la-la!" "Good catch, kiddo." "Oh, you Charley-boy, who was you pitching for last season?" "The Reds, because that's your color." "Say, if you're going to catch that four-eighteen you've got to break somebody's speed limit between here and track ten. Run along, Charley-boy, and Merry Christmas." But Mr. Charles Scully swung to a halt, poured his armful of packages into a wire basket of six-city-postcard-views for ten cents, swung open his overcoat with a sprinkling of snow on its slick-napped velvet collar, lifted his small black mustache in a smile. "Black-eyes, I'd miss three trains for you." "There's not another until the four-forty." "I should worry. Anyway, for all I know you've changed your mind and are coming out with me to-night, little one." The quick blood ran up into her small face, dyeing it, and she withdrew from his nearing features. "I have not! Gee! you're about as square as a doughnut, you are." "Jumping Juniper, can't a fellow miss his train just to wish a little beauty like you a Merry Christmas? But on the level, I want to take you out home with me to-night; honest I do, little spitfire." "Crank up there, Charley-boy; you got about thirty seconds to make that train in." "Gets you sore every time I ask you out, don't it, black-eyes? Talk about your little tin saints!" "Say, if you was any slicker you'd slide." "You can't scare me with those black eyes."