Having broken the great habit of his life by taking an uptown train at 5:15, Wesley found it quite natural that his minor habits should fall from him automatically. He did not relax into his seat and lose himself in the evening paper after his usual fashion. He did not look at his paper at all, but at the people about him. He had never seen such men and women before, so fresh-tinted, so outstanding, so electric. He seemed to have opened his eyes on a mass of vivid colours and sharp contours. It was the same sensation he experienced when he used to break his gold-rimmed spectacles, and after he had groped for a day in the mists of myopia, a new, bright world would leap out at him through the new lenses.
Wesley did not make friends easily. In a crowd he was peculiarly shy. Now he grew garrulous. At first his innate timidity rose up and choked him, but he fought it down. He turned to his neighbour on the right, a thick-set, clean-shaven youth who was painfully studying the comic pictures in his evening newspaper, and remarked, in a style utterly strange to him:
"Looks very much like the Giants had the rag cinched?"
The thick-set young man, whom Wesley imagined to be a butcher's assistant or something of the sort, looked up from his paper and said, "It certainly does seem as if the New York team had established its title to the championship."
Wesley cleared his throat again.
"When it comes to slugging the ball you've got to hand it to them," he said.
"Assuredly," said the young man, folding up his paper with the evident design of continuing the conversation.
Wesley was pleased and frightened. He had tasted another new sensation. He had broken through the frosty reserve of twenty years and had spoken to a stranger after the free and easy manner of men who make friends in Pullman cars and at lunch counters. And the stranger, instead of repulsing him, had admitted him, at the very first attempt, into the fraternity of ordinary people. It was pleasant to be one of the great democracy of the crowd, something which Wesley had never had time to be. But on the other hand, he found the strain of conversation telling upon him. He did not know how to go on.
The stranger went out, but Wesley did not care. He was lost in a delicious reverie, conscious only of being carried forward on free-beating wings into a wonderful, unknown land. The grinding of wheels and brakes as the train halted at a station and pulled out again made a languorous, soothing music. The train clattered out of the tunnel into the open air, and Wesley was but dimly aware of the change from dark to twilight. The way now ran through a region of vague apartment houses. There were trees, stretches of green field waiting for the builder, and here or there a colonial manor house with sheltered windows, resigned to its fate. Then came cottages with gardens. And in one of these Wesley, shocked into acute consciousness, saw a man with a rubber hose watering a lawn. Wesley leaped to his feet.
The train was at a standstill when he awoke to the extraordinary fact that he was twelve miles away from South Ferry, and going in the wrong direction. The imperative need of getting home as soon as he could overwhelmed him. He dashed for the door, but it slid shut in his face and the train pulled out. His fellow passengers grinned. One of the most amusing things in the world is a tardy passenger who tries to fling himself through a car door and flattens his nose against the glass. It is hard to say why the thing is amusing, but it is. Wesley did not know that he was being laughed at. He merely knew that he must go home. He got out at the next station, and when he was seated in a corner of the south-bound train, he sighed with unutterable relief. He was once more in a normal world where trains ran to South Ferry instead of away from it. He dropped off at his road crossing, just two hours late, and found his wife waiting.