“Yep.”

Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky.  The first flush of spring in the air had died, leaving chill.  They walked briskly, arm in arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their apartment house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside—­the sepulchral abode of the city’s trapped whose only escape is down the fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death.  At the base of the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the “every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation”.  Housewives with perambulators and oil-cloth shopping bags.  Children on rollerskates.  The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unbearded all summer and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak and mess of rutabaga.

Then there is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics.  It is the pulpit of the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soapbox.  From it the voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost always a raucous one.  Luther and Sophocles, and even a Citizen of Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a temple of wisdom.  What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech than the great out-of-doors!

Turning from the incline of cross-street into this petty Baghdad of the petty wise, the voice of the street corner lifted itself above the inarticulate din of the thoroughfare.  A youth, thewed like an ox, surmounted on a stack of three self provided canned-goods boxes, his in-at-the-waist silhouette thrown out against a sky that was almost ready to break out in stars; a crowd tightening about him.

“It’s a soldier boy talkin’, Gert.”

“If it ain’t!” They tiptoed at the fringe of the circle, heads back.

“Look, Gert, he’s a lieutenant; he’s got a shoulder-bar.  And those four down there holding the flags are just privates.  You can always tell a lieutenant by the bar.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Say, them boys do stack up some for Uncle Sam.”

“’Shh-h-h, Jimmie!”

“I’m here to tell you that them boys stack up some.”

A banner stiffened out in the breeze, Mr. Batch reading:  “Enlist before you are drafted.  Last chance to beat the draft.  Prove your patriotism.  Enlist now!  Your country calls!”

“Come on,” said Mr. Batch.

“Wait.  I want to hear what he’s saying.”

“... there’s not a man here before me can afford to shirk his duty to his country.  The slacker can’t get along without his country, but his country can very easily get along without him.”

Cheers.

“The poor exemption boobs are already running for doctors’ certificates and marriage licenses, but even if they get by with it—­and it is ninety-nine to one they won’t—­they can’t run away from their own degradation and shame.”