The Watermelon lighted his cigarette in the cup of his hands and tossed his match away. "If you are trying to walk in the dark," he objected, "trying to get out of your troubles, say, and not standing still in the same old place, you can't look up."
"You have no beauty in your soul," declared Henrietta. "I think the idea is beautiful, seeing a universe."
"When you are down and out, you don't take any pleasure in looking at a universe," said the Watermelon. "A dollar, or even a quarter, will look a darned sight more beautiful."
"I wouldn't like to be poor," said Billy. "It must be so terrible to have no motor-car, for one thing."
"It is," agreed the Watermelon, who would have agreed to anything Billy said. "It's simply awful."
"What did you mind most," asked Billy, "when you were a newsboy?"
"Let's go look at the universe," suggested the Watermelon hastily. "We can see it much better down the road a bit."
Billy consented, and they strolled away in the dark. The general, who thought he was talking politics, was laying down the law to the hotel clerk, and Henrietta and Bartlett were left alone. They lingered a moment on the porch and then quietly disappeared up the road in the opposite direction from that taken by Billy and the Watermelon.
Bartlett's desire was to reach Maine as soon as possible and get lost over Saturday, but to avoid every city and larger town on the way and to hurry by the smaller places where there might be telegraph or telephone connections.
"Out of touch of the world for a week," he was fond of repeating, "no letters, no papers, no worries and no nerves."