he angels. One of them wore a carnation,
Milt noted.

"Huh! I'll write back and tell Ben Sittka that hereafter he's to wear
his best-Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and a milkweed blossom when he
comes down to work at the Red Trail Garage!"

Milt drove up the brick incline into a room thousands of miles long,
with millions of new and recently polished cars standing in lines as
straight as a running-board. He begged of a high-nosed colored
functionary--not in khaki overalls but in maroon livery--"Where'll I put
this boat?"

The Abyssinian prince gave him a check, and in a tone of extreme lack of
personal interest snapped, "Take it down the aisle to the elevator."

Milt had followed the natural lines of traffic into the city; he had
spoken to no one; the prince's snort was his welcome to Seattle.

Meekly he drove past the cars so ebon and silvery, so smug and strong,
that they would have regarded a Teal bug as an insult. Another attendant
waved him into the elevator, and Milt tried not to look surprised when
the car started, not forward, but upward, as though it had turned into
an aeroplane.

When these adventures were over, when he had had a shave and a shine,
and washed his hands, and looked into a department-store window that
contained ten billion yards of silk draped against polished satinwood,
when he had felt unhappy over a movie theater large enough to contain
ten times the population of Schoenstrom, and been cursed by a policeman
for jaywalking, and had passed a hotel entirely full of diplomats and
marble and caviare--then he could no longer put off telephoning to
Claire, and humbly, in a booth meant for an umbrella-stand, he got the
Eugene Gilson house, and to a female who said "Yes?" in a tone which
made it mean "No!" he ventured, "May I speak to Miss Boltwood?"

Miss Boltwood, it seemed, was out.

He was not sorry. He was relieved. He ducked out of the telephone-booth
with a sensation of escape.

Milt was in love with Claire; she was to him the purpose of life; he
thought of her deeply and tenderly and longingly. All the way into
Seattle he had brooded about her; remembered her every word and
gesture; recalled the curve of her chin, and the fresh feeling of her
hands. But Claire had suddenly become too big. In her were all these
stores, these office buildings for clever lawyers and surgeons, these
contemptuous trolley cars, these careless people in beautiful clothes.
They were too much for him. Desperat