"Very pretty," said Herman helplessly. The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were spotlessly clean. * * * * * On Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful little men. He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt was gone. The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what they were. New York had been a city of stone--built on stone, built of stone, as cold as stone. Uptown, the city looked half-built, but insanely occupied, a forest of orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of rooms in lath and a paper-thickness of paint. The wrought-iron railings were gone, too. On Fourth Avenue, bookseller's row, you could almost persuade yourself that nothing had happened, provided you did not look down. The buildings had been made of wood, and wood they remained. The second-hand books in their wooden racks would have been comforting except that they were so clean. There was not a spot of dirt anywhere; the air was more than country-pure. There was an insane selective principle at work here, Herman realized. Everything from bedrock to loam that belonged to the Earth itself had disappeared. So had everything that had a mineral origin and been changed by refinement and mixture: concrete, wrought iron, brick, but steel and glass, porcelain and paint remained. It looked as if the planet had been the joint property of two children, one of whom didn't want to play any more, so they had split up their possessions--this is yours, this is yours, this is _mine_.... The two little men popped into view not six feet in front of Herman as he was passing a sidewalk bookstall. Both were dressed in what looked like workmen's overalls made of lucite chain-mail, or knitted glow-worms. One of them had four eyes, two brown, two blue, with spectacles for the middle pair. Ears grew like cabbages all over his bald head. The other had two eyes, the pupils of which were cross-shaped, and no other discernible features except when he opened his gap-toothed mouth: the rest of his head, face and all, was completely covered by a dense forest of red hair. As they came forward, Herman's control of his body suddenly returned. He was trying his best to turn around and go away from there, and that was what his body started to do. Moreover, certain sounds of a prayerful character, namely "Oh dear sweet Jesus," which Herman was forming in his mind, involuntarily issued from his lips.