Fourth Avenue seethed with humanity. A blind man afflicted with stone deafness could have told that hungry people were there provided his nose worked.
The street-cars had stopped running at 6.30 p.m., after the twenty-seventh accident.
The crowd was orderly and silent, as really hungry people are. And they had good manners, as the physically weak always have. And they were not impatient, for the prospect of eating always makes the starving hopeful.
A merciful darkness covered the hideousness of ten thousand faces. The reporters began to fidget like nervous women at a military play just before the execution.
H. R., seizing the exact psychological moment, said to the reporters:
It is the modern way—the press and the pressure.
He pressed the button. It turned on the lights of an electric sign hung above the entrance. The starving men read in blazing letters: