Poor Rob, feeling like a maiden of legend surrounded by dragons, with the yawning, yet unfinished, subway threatening her on one side, and insanely rushing crowds mercilessly assaulting her on all sides, gladly let the big policeman's strong arm clear a way for her to the car, which came westward through Forty-second Street.
"Broadway!" called the conductor, to whom she had confided her desire to know when that point was reached, and Rob was surprised to see six people, beside herself, rise to their feet, plunge off the car, and the men run as for their lives to swing themselves on another car, going in a different direction, just ahead of them.
"There can't be many Broadway cars," thought Rob, but looked up and down to see an interminable line of them coming both ways, and decided that this was the New York unreasonable rush, of which she had heard so much.
A woman with a gentle face, whom Rob timidly approached, put her in the way of getting the car she desired, and she perched herself sideways on the edge of the seat, watching feverishly the numbers, until she realized that she was twelve hundred numbers above the one which her father had given her as that of Mr. Baldwin's office, and subsided for a time to watch the whirl of life around her, with a dizzy interest that precluded all possibility of thought.
Keenly alive as she was in every sense, Rob could not help enjoying the ride, though it did seem interminable. Beautiful shops, displaying everything a girl cares for, were left behind, great buildings began to tower on either hand; truckmen swore at their horses, small boys tried to see how near they could come to the fender of the car in which Rob rode, yet escape unscathed; timid women ran—very like Farmer Flinders's chickens—head down and arms swinging, before the car, having waited until it was almost upon them; Broadway narrowed, yet increased in interest at every block.
An open square, set on three sides with picturesque old buildings—one really beautiful among them—and a statue which Rob immediately recognized as a figure of Nathan Hale, turned her thoughts to the revolutionary New York into which the car had brought her, but seeing, too, that the street numbers had decreased to the second hundred a few blocks lower down, her mind swung with renewed concentration to her own affairs, and her heart fluttered nervously.
Poised on the seat, ready for flight, she kept anxious watch, and at Cortlandt Street signalled the conductor to stop. Threading her way with difficulty through the narrow way, crowded at an hour so near noon, her suit-case proving a menace to others and a trial to Herself, Rob found at last the number she sought. Without giving herself time to be more afraid, she plunged in at the wide doorway, and joined the group waiting for an elevator to descend.
"Mr. Baldwin's office?" Rob said, low, to the man whose touch on the lever had caused the elevator to shoot upward, and all Rob's powers to seem to sink downward to her feet. The elevator was packed with passengers, all men, some of whom removed their hats, but most of whom kept them on, and stared at the young girl in mourning, with the wonderful hair, and the big, frightened eyes.
"Ninth floor," said the man, and continued his rising career.