“It isn’t play —for the people that make money out of it!” Nora said defensively. “It’s a business. I bet they make more money than the banks!”
The teacher nodded happily. “ Banks! Now there is a big Sister City business. Finance, market trading, clearing houses, banks.” Horse dust, Nora thought to herself, with no clear image of a substance, but a sense that the phrase was appropriate.
Mrs. Brock went on. “Well, let me hint. What’s big, and mostly glass, that you see in the suburbs and the country…?”
They guessed it. Greenhouses, nurseries and a new hydroponics experiment in winter-vegetable raising.
It was not a good day for Nora. She was unable to define “commission government” in civics, and she got three dates wrong in the history test. Moreover, when she stopped beside the school fence to argue with Judy Martin on the meaning of “morphodite,” Billy Westcott crept up behind her, tied her two long pigtails together and hung them over an iron picket. The result was that, finding herself overwhelmed by Judy’s superiority in esoteric information and being told there was “no such word,” Nora decided to run—and did not. Instead, her head jerked back nastily, her neck-hair was painfully pulled, she bumped the iron fence, and only a fast, reflex scuffling of her feet saved her from falling, and from hanging ignominiously by her braids. She unhooked herself speedily. The same thing had already happened twice before that year: once on the iron cleat of a phone pole and once on a fire extinguisher. She threw four futile rocks at the hilarious, rapidly retreating Billy.
Her journey back to her home did little to improve things.
The way from Public School 44 led out Dumond A venue and over Walnut-a matter of some twelve blocks, or about a mile. Nora preferred, however, to come by less direct routes. She had several favorites, depending on the season. One, involving a long detour, took her past Restland Cemetery and a good third of the distance into town. Another followed Hickory—the school being on the corner of that street and Dumond Avenue—diagonally across Hobart Park, which placid preserve had been a bequest to Green Prairie by the long-deceased founder of Hobart Metal Products. The park, once the Hobart estate, contained a pond; Nora enjoyed ponds-ducks came to them, fish lived in them, rowboats tipped over in them, and you could wade, if the cop was trifling with some nursemaid. She also liked, when in the humor, to go clear over to Cold Spring Street, which was beyond her home, and watch trains go by on the Kansas and Southern Railroad.
This day, however, she went along Hickory merely to River Avenue and turned south.
River Avenue crossed Plum Street, Oak, Spruce, Pine and Maple, before reaching Walnut. It was a broad thoroughfare, much used by buses and trucks and, in this district, a minor shopping street besides. Now, however, River Avenue was dug up and new sewers were being laid. This enterprise involved noise, fire and big machinery, men, moraines of Green Prairie’s underlying clay, dynamite explosions and other interesting features.
Nora’s tour, however, was unlucky. She met two boys she’d never seen before who said they lived over Schneider’s Delicatessen, challenged her to penny-pitching and won eight cents, all she had on her at the time. Furthermore, a bus hit a puddle at the Spruce Street intersection and spattered her dress.