for a full nine hours a day.

* * * * *

It was at the end of the fourth day that Monsignor went round the
city in a car, partly to get some air, and partly to see for
himself how things were settling down.

Of course, as he told himself afterwards, he scarcely had a fair
opportunity of judging how a Socialist State would be when the
machinery was in running order. Yet it seemed to him that, making
all allowances for confusion and noise and choked streets and the
rest, underneath it all was a spirit strangely and drearily
unlike that to which he was becoming accustomed in Europe. The
very faces of the people seemed different.

He stopped for a while in the quarter to which the English had
been assigned--that which in old Boston had been, he learned,
the Italian quarter. Here, in the little square where he halted,
everything was surprisingly in order. The open space, paved with
concrete, was unoccupied by any signs of moving in; the houses
were trim and neat, new painted for the most part; and people
seemed to be going about their business with an air of quiet
orderliness. Certainly American arrangements, he thought, were
marvellously efficient, enabling as they did some fifteen
hundred persons to settle down into new houses within the space
of four days. (He had learned something, while he sat on the
central board, of the elaborate system of tickets and officials
and enquiry offices by which such miraculous swiftness had been
made possible.)