ore consistently excellent flight in America than Hawk
Ericson's race from Chicago to New York.

Carl considered the delights of the Cowles flat, Ray's stories about
Plato and business, and the sentimental things Gertie played on the
guitar. He suddenly determined to go off some place and fly an
aeroplane; as suddenly knew that he was not yet ready to return to the
game. He read the _Evening Telegram_ and cheerlessly peered out of the
window at the gray snow-veil which shrouded Forty-second Street.

As he finished his dessert and stirred his coffee he stared into a
street-car stalled in a line of traffic outside. Within the car, seen
through the snow-mist, was a girl of twenty-two or three, with satiny
slim features and ash-blond hair. She was radiant in white-fox furs.
Carl craned to watch. He thought of the girl who, asking a direction
before the Florida Lunch Room in Chicago, had inspired him to become a
chauffeur.

The girl in the street-car was listening to her companion, who was a
dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face,
well set-up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown pony-skin
and a small hat that was all lines and no trimming. Both of them
seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman
beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a
slight stomach-ache. The dark-haired girl tapped her round knees with
the joy of being alive.

The street-car started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle the
two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still
blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the
cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten cents change, ran across the
street (barely escaping a taxicab), galloped around the end of the
car, swung up on the platform.

As he took a seat opposite the two girls he asked himself just what he
expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why
had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his
unconscious conquests from behind his newspaper, vastly content.

In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car the girls were irreverently
discussing "George." He heard enough to know that they were of the
rather smart, rather cultured class known as "New-Yorkers"--they might
be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid
governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor-car and a
useful papa in the family.

Bu