By some fortune, he had a meeting which took him early, leaving the household rocking with his hunt for a properly ironed collar. Lory electing to rest, the Inger set forth with his host, and left him as soon as he could, with the promise to be his guest for that night. This little man was one whom, in a saloon in Inch, the Inger would unmercifully have bedevilled. But sitting at his table, he had taken him at another value, and later had insisted hotly on paying his car fare. Once alone down town in that city, the Inger walked with head erect, his eyes on the façades of buildings, on the lights, on all the aspects of a city street to which the habitués grow accustomed. This was, for the world of a city, the most beautiful world which he had ever walked. He knew not at all what it was that pleased him. But the order and smoothness of the streets, the leisure or pleasant absorption of the passers, the abundant light, the dignity of the stone, all these met him with another contact than that of muddy, roystering Inch, or the shining body of San Francisco, or the sullen, struggling soul of Chicago. “A fellow must have a nerve to get drunk here,” was the way that he thought all this. Before the office of _The Post_ he halted and crossed. A lit bulletin board had called a crowd: “President Receives Telegrams from Eighteen Mass Meetings Demanding War.” he read. A rough voice cried out: “Yes, and if there’d been anybody home in Washington, we’d had a meeting here!” No one made any comment, and the man disappeared in the crowd. “Ten Thousand Cut to Pieces in the Stelvio Pass.” the bulletin went on. “‘End of the War Not in Sight’ Lord of Admiralty says. “Two Thousand Women March Sixty Miles in the Snow with Their Children. “Seven Women Travel Together to Washington from Seven Warring Nations.” The Inger went on down the street. The bulletin board was like a window opened abruptly upon another world, and closed again. Again the quiet and soft brilliance of Pennsylvania Avenue came to meet him. He turned and looked back at that dim, watchful dome. “Nothin’ to stir a man up to enlist here,” he thought. “This town looks like the war’d been put to bed.” He looked in at the door of the New Willard, saw the lobby and the corridor unaccountably filled with women, and retreated. On the street he looked down at himself in slow speculation. “I donno but what I’d look better in some differ’nt clothes,” he thought, in surprise. When he returned to the house, Lory had gone to bed, and he felt a vague disappointment. He had wanted to tell her about it. Yet, in the morning, when he tried to tell her, all that he found to say was: “It’s a nice, neat town. Everybody minds their own business. I tell you, a fellow’d have his nerve to get drunk here.”