The girl in the street-car was listening to her companion, who was a dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face, well set-up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown pony-skin and a small hat that was all lines and no trimming. Both of them seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a slight stomach-ache. The dark-haired girl tapped her round knees with the joy of being alive. The street-car started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle the two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten cents change, ran across the street (barely escaping a taxicab), galloped around the end of the car, swung up on the platform. As he took a seat opposite the two girls he asked himself just what he expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his unconscious conquests from behind his newspaper, vastly content. In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car the girls were irreverently discussing "George." He heard enough to know that they were of the rather smart, rather cultured class known as "New-Yorkers"--they might be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor-car and a useful papa in the family. But in any case they were not of the kind he could pick up. The tall girl of the ash-blond hair seemed to be named Olive, being quite unolive in tint, while her livelier companion was apparently christened Ruth. Carl wearied of Olive's changeless beauty as quickly as he did of her silver-handled umbrella. She merely knew how to listen. But the less spectacular, less beautiful, less languorous, dark-haired Ruth was born a good comrade. Her laughter marked her as one of the women whom earth-quake and flood and child-bearing cannot rob of a sense of humor; she would have the inside view, the sophisticated understanding of everything. The car was at last free of the traffic. It turned a corner and started northward. Carl studied the girls.