"Two, three, four--six, seven--nine," he says, craning his neck and
casting up his eye. Then, turning with a jocular air to the elder lady
opposite, "I don't suppose that Marshall & Belden, for instance, have got
up to nine stories yet!"

"Marshall & Belden!" she repeated. Her enunciation was strikingly
ejaculatory, and she laid an impatient and unforgiving emphasis upon the
latter name. "I don't know what will happen if your father doesn't assert
himself pretty soon."

"I should think as much!" observed the elder girl, explosively; "or they
will never get up even to seven. The idea of Mr. Belden's proposing to
enlarge by taking that ground adjoining! But of course poor pa didn't put
up the building himself, nor anything; oh no! So _he_ doesn't know
whether the walls will stand a couple of extra stories or not. Upon my
word," she went on with increased warmth, "I don't feel quite sure
whether pa was the one to start the business in the first place and to
keep it going along ever since, or whether he's just a new errand-boy,
who began there a week ago! August, are we stuck here to stay forever?"

The little sorrel mare started up again and entered upon another stage of
her journey. The first lights began to appear in the store-fronts; the
newsboys were shrieking the last editions of the evening papers; the
frenzied comedy of belated shopping commenced to manifest itself upon the
pavements.

The throng of jostling women was especially thick and eager before a vast
and vulgar front whose base was heaped with cheap truck cheaply ticketed,
and whose long row of third-story windows was obscured by a great reach
of cotton cloth tacked to a flimsy wooden frame. Unprecedented bargains