Herman wanted to say, "Next year I'll probably be in a strait-jacket." He tried to say it. He stuttered, "N-n-n-n—" and ended, glancing at the ground at her feet, "Transplanting some petunias?"
The woman's mouth worked. She said, "Yes. I thought I might's well put them along here, where they'd get more sun. Aren't they pretty?"
"Very pretty," said Herman helplessly.
The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were spotlessly clean.
n Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful little men.
He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt was gone.
The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what they were. New York had been a city of stone—built on stone, built of stone, as cold as stone.
Uptown, the city looked half-built, but insanely occupied, a forest of orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of rooms in lath and a paper-thickness of paint.