He treated himself to a deliberate, luxurious look at Lory, leaned negligently against the shoulder of the man seated nearest, and went back to his newspaper.
It seemed incredible that one should ride for an hour on a street car to get anywhere. At the end of ten minutes the Inger had gone back to the platform and:
“Say,” he said. “We wasn’t goin’ in the country, you know.”
The conductor went on counting transfers.
“Say—” the Inger went on, slightly louder, and the man glanced up imperturbably.
“I says I’d leave you off, didn’t I?” he demanded. “It’s ten mile yet.”
Ten miles! The Inger stood by Lory and looked at the streets. Amazing piles of dirty masonry, highways of dirty stone, processions of carts, armies of people.
“He lied,” he thought. “They couldn’t keep it up for ten miles.”
When at last the two were set down, it was on one of those vast, treeless stretches outside Chicago, where completed sidewalks cut the uncompleted lengths of sand and coarse grass, and where an occasional house stands out like a fungus—as quickly evolved as a fungus, too, and almost as parti-colored. But these open spaces the two hailed in thanksgiving.