hat
consciousness of Mary's the great structure may have partaken of beauty.
Sheridan had made some of the things he said emphatic enough to remain
with her. She went over and over them--and they began to seem true:
"Only ONE girl he could feel THAT sorry for!" "Gurney says he's got you
on his brain so bad--" The man's clumsy talk began to sing in her heart.
The song was begun there when she saw the accident.

She was directly opposite the Sheridan Building then, waiting for the
traffic to thin before she crossed, though other people were risking the
passage, darting and halting and dodging parlously. Two men came from
the crowd behind her, talking earnestly, and started across. Both wore
black; one was tall and broad and thick, and the other was taller, but
noticeably slender. And Mary caught her breath, for they were Bibbs and
his father. They did not see her, and she caught a phrase in Bibbs's
mellow voice, which had taken a crisper ring: "Sixty-eight thousand
dollars? Not sixty-eight thousand buttons!" It startled her queerly,
and as there was a glimpse of his profile she saw for the first time a
resemblance to his father.

She watched them. In the middle of the street Bibbs had to step ahead
of his father, and the two were separated. But the reckless passing of
a truck, beyond the second line of rails, frightened a group of country
women who were in course of passage; they were just in front of Bibbs,
and shoved backward upon him violently. To extricate himself from them
he stepped back, directly in front of a moving trolley-car--no place for
absent-mindedness, but Bibbs was still absorbed in thoughts concerned
with what he had been saying to his father. There were shrieks and
yells; Bibbs looked the wrong way--and then Mary saw the heavy figure
of Sheridan plunge straight forward in front of the car. With
absolute disregard of his own life, he hurled himself at Bibbs like a
football-player shunting off an opponent, and to Mary it seemed
that they both went down together. But that was all she could
see--automobiles, trucks, and wagons closed in between. She made out
that the trolley-car stopped jerkily, and she saw a policeman breaking
his way through the instantly condensing crowd, while the traffic came
to a standstill, and people stood up in automobiles or climbed upon
the hubs and tires of wheels, not to miss a chance of seeing anything
horrible.

Mary tried to get through; it was impossible. Other policemen