"Isn't this New York?" she asked.
Her seatmate surveyed her facetiously.
"Some of it," he said. "Want any particular part of the village?"
"The main station," blushed the provincial.
"You mean the Grand Central. Sit tight then. This is only a Hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street—Harlem, you know, where the goat joke flourishes. Never saw a billy there myself, and I boarded a year on Lenox Avenue, too."
Jean turned from a disquisition on boarding-houses to the car-window. In its night-time glitter of electricity the street which he dismissed with a careless numeral quite fulfilled her rural notion of Broadway. If these were but the outposts, what was the thing itself!
They shot a tunnel presently, which the drummer berated in terms long since made familiar by the newspapers, threaded a maze of block-signals and switch-lights, and halted at last in an enormous cavern of a place which she needed no hint from her now too friendly neighbor to assure her was truly New York.
The drummer urged his escort, but she eluded him in leaving the car and hurried on in the press. Nearing the gate, however, her pace slackened. The bigness of the train-shed confused her, and she was daunted by the clamor of hackmen and street-cars which penetrated from without. Amy had written that she would meet her if she could leave her work, but Jean could spy her nowhere in the waiting crowd banked in the white glare of the arc-lights beyond the barrier. They were unfamiliar to the last pallid urban face.
She had gone slowly down the human aisle and was wavering on the outskirts, uncertain whether to wait longer or adventure for herself, when the drummer reappeared at her elbow.
"Didn't your party show up?" he said. "I call that a mean trick. You had better let me help you out, after all. You look like a girl with sand. What say we give 'em a lesson? We can have supper at a nice, quiet little place I know up the street, take in a show afterward, and then when we're good and ready hunt up your slow-coach friends. Is it a go?"