he might as well
have thrown it on you. It would have been braver, for then he'd have
taken his chance of my whipping him for it if I could."

"IS there soot on my cheek, Bibbs, or were you only saying so
rhetorically? IS there?"

"Is there? There ARE soot on your cheeks, Mary--a fleck on each. One
landed since I mentioned the first."

She halted immediately, giving him her handkerchief, and he succeeded in
transferring most of the black from her face to the cambric. They were
entirely matter-of-course about it.

An elderly couple, it chanced, had been walking behind Bibbs and Mary
for the last block or so, and passed ahead during the removal of the
soot. "There!" said the elderly wife. "You're always wrong when
you begin guessing about strangers. Those two young people aren't
honeymooners at all--they've been married for years. A blind man could
see that."

"I wish I did know who threw that soot on you," said Bibbs, looking up
at the neighboring chimneys, as they went on. "They arrest children for
throwing snowballs at the street-cars, but--"

"But they don't arrest the street-cars for shaking all the pictures in
the houses crooked every time they go by. Nor for the uproar they make.
I wonder what's the cost in nerves for the noise of the city each year.
Yes, we pay the price for living in a 'growing town,' whether we have
money to pay or none."

"Who is it gets the pay?" said Bibbs.

"Not I!" she laughed.

"Nobody gets it. There isn't any pay; there's only money. And only some
of the men down-town get much of that. That's what my father wants me to
get."

"Yes," she said, smiling to him, and nodding. "And you don't want it,
and you don't need it."

"But you don't think I'm a sleep-walker, Mary?" He had told her of his
father's new plans for him, though he had not described the vigor and
picturesqueness of their setting forth. "You think I'm right?"

"A thousand times!" she cried. "There aren't so many happy people in
this world, I think--and you say you've found what makes you happy. If
it's a dream--keep it!"

"The thought of going down there--into the money shuffle--I hate it as
I never hated the shop!" he said. "I hate it! And the city itself, the
city that the money shuffle has made--just look at it! Look at it in
winter. The snow's tried hard to make the ugliness bearable, but the
ugliness is winning; it's making the snow hideous; the snow's getting
dirty on top, and it's foul underneath with