"One; a classmate."
"Man?"
"No, a girl."
"Why did you leave home?"
Rose began to grow angry. "Because I couldn't live the life of a cow or a cabbage. I wanted to see the city."
The Doctor arose. "Come here a moment." Rose obeyed and stood beside her at the window, and they looked out across a stretch of roofs, heaped and humped into mountainous masses, blurred and blent and made appalling by smoke and plumes of steam. A scene as desolate as a burnt-out volcano—a jumble of hot bricks, jagged eave-spouts, gas-vomiting chimneys, spiked railings, glass skylights and lofty spires, a hideous and horrible stretch of stone and mortar, cracked and seamed into streets. It had no limits and it palpitated under the hot September sun, boundless and savage. At the bottom of the crevasses men and women speckled the pavement like minute larvæ.
"Is that what you came here to see?" asked the Doctor.
Rose drew a deep breath and faced her.
"Yes, and I'm not afraid of it. It's mighty! It is grander than I expected it to be—grand and terrible, but it's where things are done."
Isabel Herrick studied her a little closer.