Till other passengers should come the conductor lounged against the guard of the platform in a conversational posture.
“Well, generally it takes you four or five days. You got to learn all the cross streets, and the principal places on all the lines.”
“Yes?”
“It didn't take me more'n two. Boston boy.”
“Yes,” said Lemuel, with a fine discouragement. “I presume the conductors are mostly from Boston.”
“They're from everywhere. And some of 'em are pretty streaked, I can tell you; and then the rest of us has got to suffer; throws suspicion on all of us. One fellow gets to stealin' fares, and then everybody's got to wear a bell-punch. I never hear mine go without thinkin' it says, 'Stop thief!' Makes me sick, I can tell you.”
After a while Lemuel asked, “How do you get such a position?”
The conductor seemed to be thinking about some thing else. “It's a pretty queer kind of a world, anyway, the way everybody's mixed up with everybody else. What's the reason, if a man wants to steal, he can't steal and suffer for it himself, without throwin' the shame and the blame on a lot more people that never thought o' stealin'? I don't notice much when a fellow sets out to do right that folks think everybody else is on the square. No, sir, they don't seem to consider that kind of complaint so catching. Now, you take another thing: A woman goes round with the scarlet fever in her clothes, and a whole carful of people take it home to their children; but let a nice young girl get in, fresh as an apple, and a perfect daisy for wholesomeness every way, and she don't give it to a single soul on board. No, sir; it's a world I can't see through, nor begin to.”
“I never thought of it that way,” said Lemuel, darkened by this black pessimism of the conductor. He had not, practically, found the world so unjust as the conductor implied, but he could not controvert his argument. He only said, “May be the right thing makes us feel good in some way we don't know of.”
“Well, I don't want to feel good in some way I don't know of, myself,” said the conductor very scornfully.