When he complained that his steak was mostly gristle, and that he did not want his pie yet, Hebe answered:
"Don't get flip! Think you're at the Worldoff?"
Poor Shelby's nerves were so rocked that he condescended to complain to the clerk. For answer he got this:
"Mamie's all right. If you don't like our ways, better build a hotel of your own."
"I guess I will," said Shelby.
He went to his room to read. The gas was no more than darkness made visible. He vowed to change that, too.
He would telephone to the theater. The telephone-girl was forever in answering, and then she was impudent. Besides, the theater was closed. Shelby learned that there was "a movin'-pitcher show going"! He went, and it moved him to the door.
The sidewalks were full of doleful loafers and loaferesses. Men placed their chairs in the street and smoked heinous tobacco. Girls and women dawdled and jostled to and from the ice-cream-soda fountains.
The streets that night were not lighted at all, for the moon was abroad, and the board of aldermen believed in letting God do all He could for the town. In fact, He did nearly all that the town could show of charm. The trees were majestic, the grass was lavishly spread, the sky was divinely blue by day and angelically bestarred at night.
Shelby compared his boyhood impressions with the feelings governing his mind now that it was adult and traveled. He felt that he had grown, but that the town had stuck in the mire. He felt an ambition to lift it and enlighten it. Like the old builder who found Rome brick and left it marble, Shelby determined that the Wakefield which he found of plank he should leave at least of limestone. Everything he saw displeased him and urged him to reform it altogether, and he said: