will! God bless the old weather!" cried the
happy Jim.

CHAPTER IX

Through the open country Bibbs was borne flying between brown fields
and sun-flecked groves of gray trees, to breathe the rushing, clean
air beneath a glorious sky--that sky so despised in the city, and so
maltreated there, that from early October to mid-May it was impossible
for men to remember that blue is the rightful color overhead.

Upon each of Bibbs's cheeks there was a hint of something almost
resembling a pinkishness; not actual color, but undeniably its phantom.
How largely this apparition may have been the work of the wind upon his
face it is difficult to calculate, for beyond a doubt it was partly the
result of a lady's bowing to him upon no more formal introduction than
the circumstance of his having caught her looking into his window a
month before. She had bowed definitely; she had bowed charmingly. And it
seemed to Bibbs that she must have meant to convey her forgiveness.

There had been something in her recognition of him unfamiliar to
his experience, and he rode the warmer for it. Nor did he lack the
impression that he would long remember her as he had just seen her: her
veil tumultuously blowing back, her face glowing in the wind--and that
look of gay friendliness tossed to him like a fresh rose in carnival.

By and by, upon a rising ground, the driver halted the car, then backed
and tacked, and sent it forward again with its nose to the south and the
smoke. Far before him Bibbs saw the great smudge upon the horizon,
that nest of cloud in which the city strove and panted like an engine
shrouded in its own steam. But to Bibbs, who had now to go to the very
heart of it, for a commanded interview with his father, the distant
cloud was like an implacable genius issuing thunderously in smoke from
his enchanted bottle, and irresistibly drawing Bibbs nearer and nearer.

They passed from the farm lands, and came, in the amber light of
November late afternoon, to the farthermost outskirts of the city; and
here the sky shimmered upon the verge of change from blue to gray;
the smoke did not visibly permeate the air, but it was there,
nevertheless--impalpable, thin, no more than the dust of smoke. And
then, as the car drove on, the chimneys and stacks of factories came
swimming up into view like miles of steamers advancing abreast, every
funnel with its vast plume, savage and black, sweeping to the horizon,
dripping wealth and dirt and