impartial spectatorship, entertained him. Would he, caught like this,
wedged into an iron system, take it so lightly, accept it so humanly? It
was the best the world held out for her: to be permitted to remain in the
system, to serve out her twenty or thirty years, drying up in the thin, hot
air of the schoolroom; then, ultimately, when released, to have the means
to subsist in some third-rate boarding-house until the end. Or marry again?
But the dark lines under the eyes, the curve of experience at the mouth,
did not warrant that supposition. She had had her trial of that
alternative.

She did not question him, and evinced no curiosity about his world. She had
touched it on the extreme edge, and she was content with that, satisfied
probably that this unexpected renewal of their connection was most
casual--too fortunate to happen again. So she took him into a perfectly
easy intimacy; it was the nearness that comes between two people when there
is slight probability of a common future.

At last she turned into one of the streets that crossed the avenue at long
intervals. This one was more developed than those they had passed: a row of
gigantic telephone poles stretched along its side; two car tracks in use
indicated that it was a thoroughfare. At the corner there was an
advertising sign of The Hub Clothing House; and beneath, on one spoke of a
tiny hub, _This is Ninety-first Street_; and at right angles on
another spoke, _This is Washington Avenue_. He remembered vaguely
having seen a Washington Avenue miles to the north. The thing had been
drawn on the map by a ruler, without regard to habitations; on the map it
probably went on into Indiana, to the Ohio River,--to the Gulf for all he
knew.

Yet the cross-road was more promising than anything they had met: a truck