Potter sat back comfortably and sipped from his stein. He appeared unconscious that, from other tables, glances were directed toward him, and that men standing at the bar mentioned his name and pointed him out to companions. He began chatting pleasantly. "Not pinched, eh?" asked Randall. "Suppose I'll get mine in the morning," Potter said, without interest. "I'd 'a' let her take her medicine," Randall said. "It wasn't any of your funeral.... Didn't even say thank you." Potter looked at him musingly. "That was the best part of it," he said, presently. "Sort of proves she's being natural; not four-flushing like some of these girls. They'd have burbled and kissed my hand--stepped out of character, you know. She didn't." A boy came into the room with an armful of papers. What he called could not be heard distinctly above the din of the place. Potter raised his hand and the boy threw a paper before him. The young man glanced at it, seemed to stiffen. He sat back in his chair while the others watched him, arrested by something in his manner, something portentous. He stood up and looked from one to the other of them. Then he laid down the paper slowly. "The _Lusitania_ has been torpedoed," he said, in a quiet voice, "without warning. Hundreds of Americans are lost--women and children." He stopped and repeated the last words. "Women and children." For a moment he stood motionless.... "It means war," he said. Every eye was on him. He held them. He stopped them as if they had been so many clocks with their hands pointing to this fateful hour. He made them feel the event. Nobody spoke. Potter turned very slowly and surveyed the room, then, still very slowly, he walked out of the room without a word or a nod. His stein was left, scarcely touched, before his chair. CHAPTER II Potter Waite stood a moment at the curb beside his car, looking at the heart of this great new city. At his right, Cadillac Square stretched broadly away to the County Building's square tower. Within his memory this handsome space had been a public market, unsightly, evil of odor, reeking with decaying vegetables and the refuse of the meat-stalls. To-day it was overcrowded with parked automobiles. At his left opened the Campus Martius, bisected by the magnificent width of Woodward Avenue. There, on its little irregular plot, squatted the City Hall, shabby, slatternly, forbidding. It seemed, against the background, the palisade, of upreaching sky-scrapers of terra-cotta and brick, to typify that thing we tolerate as municipal government. As was the shabby building to its clean, its magnificent, neighbors, so was the thing it contained--the government of a great city--to the governments of private enterprises which had made that city a place to excite the envious admiration of her sister municipalities.