ked, gray wash-bowl that served for thirty
men, such was his food for dreams.

Because his muscles were made of country earth and air he distanced
the packers from the slums, however. He became incredibly swift at
nailing boxes and crates and smashing the heavy wrapping-paper into
shape about odd bundles. The foreman promised to make Carl his
assistant. But on the cold December Saturday when his elevation was
due he glanced out of a window, and farewell all ambition as a packer.

The window belonged to the Florida Bakery and Lunch Room, where Carl
was chastely lunching. There was dirty sawdust on the floor, six pine
tables painted red and adorned with catsup-bottles whose mouths were
clotted with dried catsup, and a long counter scattered with bread and
white cakes and petrified rolls. Behind the counter a snuffling,
ill-natured fat woman in slippers handed bags of crullers to
shrill-voiced children who came in with pennies. The tables were
packed with over-worked and underpaid men, to whom lunch was merely a
means of keeping themselves from feeling inconveniently empty--a state
to which the leadlike viands of the Florida Lunch Room were a certain
prevention.

Carl was gulping down salty beef stew and bitter coffee served in
handleless cups half an inch thick. Beside him, elbow jogging elbow,
was a surly-faced man in overalls. The old German waiters shuffled
about and bawled, "_Zwei_ bif stew, _ein_ cheese-cake." Dishes
clattered incessantly. The sicky-sweet scent of old pastry, of
coffee-rings with stony raisins and buns smeared with dried cocoanut
fibers, seemed to permeate even the bitter coffee.

Carl got down most of his beef stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of
hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced
out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big,
leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty,
rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white
furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a
life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman,
she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of winter, and
skipped away.

"Bet she'd be a peach to know.... Fat chance I'd have to meet her,
wrapping up baby-carriages for the North Shore commuters all day! All
day!... Well, guess I'm going to honorably discharge myself!"

He left the job that afternoon.

His satiny Norse cheeks shone as he raced home