Nobody answered. Wenny walked along at Nan's side, his fists clenching and unclenching nervously. They had reached the Park Street corner of the Common where the steeple of the church stood up lithe and slender out of the muddle of arclights into the tumultuous sky where the frayed edges of clouds trailed along ruddy from the reflection of streets. In the lee of the subway stations sailors loafed with the broad collars of their jackets turned up watching the wind tussle with the skirts of a couple of girls who strutted back and forth with jerky impatient steps. A trail of Salvation Army lasses hobbled by following a fat redcheeked man with a cornet. Through the narrow crowded street towards Scollay Square the wind was less searching. In the floods of light in front of the moving picture houses dapper young men in overcoats belted at the waist waited for girls they had made dates with. A fat man threw away his cigarette and advanced towards a blonde girl who had just crossed the street; with one hand he was straightening his necktie. The smile on his puffy, razorscraped face kindled in her straight lips. Up a side street a man in a red sweater was preaching about something in a voice like a sea lion's. In the middle of the Square a policeman had hold of a holloweyed little man whiskered like a bottle cleaner whom he was shaking by the shoulder and roaring at. Wenny jumped back to avoid a truck lumbering up noisily out of Cornhill. Why didn't I let it run over me? Then the shop windows of Hanover Street full of price-signs were sliding past. Wenny felt vague interest in the streets and people he was walking among, the sort of disconnected interest he had felt when a child in the tableaux in the Old Mill at Revere, gliding along through expressionless dark, occasionally peering out at incidents, random gestures and faces. A year ago, he was thinking, I would have imagined every man, woman and child I met part of some absurd romantic vortex I was just on the point of being sucked into myself. I know better now. Do I? "Funny, the thought," he said aloud, "That I pass people on the street and say to myself what wonderful lives they must be living, and they look at me out of their own emptiness and say the same thing... We're going to the Venice, aren't we?" "Mind, no garlic," put in Fanshaw. "We'll even let you have the eternal broiled lamb chop without hooting." A flurry of snow fine as sand drove down the street. "What do you think of this for the Boston climate?" said Nan. "Here we are!" The restaurant was nearly empty. They shook the snow off their overcoats and settled themselves at the round table in the window. "What's so nice about this place, in spite of the garlic and the stains on the cloth and everything," Fanshaw was saying, "Is that it gives us a breathing space from Boston, a quiet eminence where we can sit undisturbed and look about us ... O, Wenny, do pull up your necktie."