"Ember? No," he says; "he's never here. He works off in God-forsaken spots. How are you going to like the city?"
I looked down the shiny crowded street. All to once I saw it different. Before that I'd been thinking he might be in every crowd.
"It's awful lonesome here," I says.
The policeman at the corner held up his hand, and we had to sit still and wait. The little young man leaned on the wheel.
"I hope you'll let me keep you from getting too lonesome," he says.
I turned round on him. In another minute I'd have given him the thing I always tried to say back, smart and quick. "When I'm that lonesome, I'll go traveling back home again," was what come in my head. Instead of that, all at once I wondered what the woman in the pinkish dress and hat in the studio would have said. And I said what she did say:
"I beg your pardon?"
He laughed. "All right," he said, and started the car. "I do go pretty fast. But, by jove, you know, you bowl a fellow over."
I didn't say anything. I was thinking. Here was a man that had been with all those people yesterday, the people that were the way I wanted to be. He had always been with them. He had money, I thought—his clothes and his cuffs, and then the car, looked as if he had. Probably he knew the same things, almost, that Mr. Ember knew. He ought to be able to help me.
"Mr. Carney," I says, "have you been to see Europe, and Asia—and volcanoes?"