Jack.

"And you can depend on your evening suit to be up in time. But I am going
to rush a little broader braid on those ready-made trousers--you can
carry that, too," Burleigh concluded.

When they parted Jack turned into Fifth Avenue. Before he had gone a
block the bulky eminence of a Fifth Avenue stage awakened his
imagination. How could anybody think of confinement in a taxicab when he
might ride in the elephant's howdah of that top platform, enjoying mortal
superiority over surrounding humanity? Jack hung the howdah with silken
streamers and set a mahout's turban on the head of the man on the seat in
front of him, while the glistening semi-oval tops of the limousines
floating in the mist of the rising grade from Madison Square to
Forty-second Street, swarmed and halted in a kind of blind, cramped _pas
de quatre_ from cross street to cross street, amid the breaking surge of
pedestrians.

"Such a throbbing of machine motion," he thought, "that I don't see
how anybody can have an emotion of his own without bumping into
somebody else's."

It was a scene of another age and world to him, puzzling, overpowering,
dismal, mocking him with a sense of loneliness that he had never felt on
the desert. Could he ever catch up with this procession which had all the
time been moving on in the five years of his absence? Could he learn to
talk and think in the regulated manner of the traffic rules of
convention? The few chums of his brief home school-days were long away
from the fellowship of academies; they had settled in their grooves, with
established intimacies. If he found his own flock he could claim
admission to the fold only with the golden key of his millions, rather
than by the password of kindred understanding.

The tripping, finely-clad women, human flower of all the maelstrom of
urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized
picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he
could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as
a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever she was
in his mind.

And the Doge! He was the wisest man in the world. With a nod of
well-considered and easy generosity Jack presented him with the new
Public Library. And then all the people on the sidewalks vanished and
the buildings melted away into sunswept levels, and the Avenue was a
trail down which Mary came on her pony in the resplendent sufficiency of
h