"I think I'll try an' get a job on a section gang on the railway this summer, Fanshaw." "A fine Italian laborer you'd make, Wenny; why you would never get up early enough, and think of the food and the bunkhouses, fearful!" "I think I'd like it for a while." Through chinks in the great bulk of the Armory light and a racket of voices trickled out into the fog like sand out of a cart. "I guess it's a dance," said Wenny. The day that Ficino finished his great work--Plato was it?--Pico della Mirandola rode into Florence and the lilies were in bloom, Fanshaw was thinking, and wondering whether he would have enough money to go abroad comfortably next summer. If I could only leave Mother. "For crissake lemme walk between yez a sec," came a breathless voice from behind them. Fanshaw hastened his stride. His muscles were tense. A holdup. "Walk slow like. Lemme walk between yez for crissake." Fanshaw looked desperately up the long straight street towards the glare of Central Square. Not a policeman of course. The man walked panting between them with red sweating face stuck forward. Fanshaw dropped back a step and came up on the outside of Wenny. "What's the trouble?" Wenny was saying. "Hell to pay.... Fight in the Armory, see? I doan know what it was about.... I was lookin' at two fellows fightin' an' a guy, a big tall guy, comes up to me, an' says, Well, what about it? Then he called me a sonofabitch.... I guess he was a Catholic, one of them South Boston guys. I hit 'im in the jaw, see? An' then I saw the bulls comin' an' I beat it. You don't care if I walk between yez, just to the corner?" "Of course not," said Wenny. At the first corner the man left them. "I'll run along to home and mother now," he said. "Wasn't that rich," cried Wenny laughing. "Say suppose we go back to see what's happening." "The policemen would probably arrest us as accessories. You don't believe that man's story, do you? Probably a burglar making off." "You are an old sourbelly this evening. What's the matter?" Wenny hopped and skipped along beside him roaring with laughter. "I am rather depressed. Music depresses me." They had reached the long brightly lighted oblong of Central Square where the fog was thinned by the shine of the plateglass windows of cheap furniture stores and the twisted glint of tinware in the window of Woolworth's. Young men loafed on the edge of the sidewalk and stumpy girls chattered in the doorways of candy shops. "Where were you born, Fanshaw? I can't seem to remember?" "Why?" "I was thinking up where people I knew were born. Nan was born in Boston, Beacon Hill.... Central Square would be a comical place to be born." "You knew perfectly well I was born in Omaha. You just want the satisfaction of hearing me say it." Scraps of talk kept impinging upon them as they threaded through the groups on the sidewalk.