A single-track car line wound through Main Street, not much caring whether cars went over it or not. The People’s National Bank, the Bishop Jewelry with the sidewalk clock that was never correct, Joe Service’s News Room, Edwards Brothers’ Cigar Store, The Red Front Grocery, the Michalman Misses-and-Ladies-Suits, the Bon Ton Millinery, the Woolworth Five-and-Ten, the _Daily Telegraph_ office with bulletins about the latest developments on the Somme, the Masonic Temple, the Y. M. C. A., Williams Clothing Emporium,—a thousand towns had them and would always have them until America ceased to be. She was glad she possessed a sense of humor. And yet what a dispirited, uninteresting, plodding sort of existence. The plainness and crudity of everything bothered her. It was piteous. She saw a greasy barber shop next door to the Élite Lunch Room with a fly-speckled sign in the window of the latter: “Eat Here or We Both Starve.” She caught glimpses of rakishly barbered heads moving about pool tables behind a foggy window filled with wrestling-match placards and announcements of dance carnivals. A basket of eggs marked “Fresh at 17c” was set down close to the glass in the window of the Metropolitan Drug Store. A small boy with an enormous fur cap clanked the iron tie-ring in front of a gift shop with a torn awning. A washed-out woman in a hideous hat waited in a sleigh while her husband smoked a five-cent cigar and then came to untie the huge-rumped horse with his big fingers and take his place beside her beneath a ponderous buffalo robe. A long curb-line of carefully groomed young bucks with no place to go but home assayed her figure as she passed in front of the Olympic Movie and commented about her ankles. She stopped in front of the hotel again and tried to decide what one thing was the keynote to the place and its people. She finally decided it must be the dilapidated Ford truck with a torn and dirty horse blanket thrown over its radiator. The truck was left, headed into the curb in a hay-strewn gutter, in front of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Store. A flock of pigeons about it were being extremely bothered by the sidewalk traffic. Madelaine was neither prig nor snob. Yet she wondered how people could possibly pass all their lives in such a place. Especially she pitied the women. She went inside the hotel at last and found that the “Ladies’ Parlor” overlooked the street. Before she made any inquiries as to Nathan, she sank into one of the rockers. As she meditated, with a little ache of excitement in her heart, other scenes came to her,—scenes she unconsciously compared with the lot of the town’s women here. The first lamps of evening blinked on and found her still meditating.