“Are you sure, Bibbs?  It can’t be for nothing; it must be stronger for something, even though he doesn’t know what it is.  Perhaps what he and his kind are struggling for is something so great they couldn’t see it—­so great none of us could see it.”

“No, he’s just like some blind, unconscious thing heaving underground—­”

“Till he breaks through and leaps out into the daylight,” she finished for him, cheerily.

“Into the smoke,” said Bibbs.  “Look at the powder of coal-dust already dirtying the decent snow, even though it’s Sunday.  That’s from the little pigs; the big ones aren’t so bad, on Sunday!  There’s a fleck of soot on your cheek.  Some pig sent it out into the air; he might as well have thrown it on you.  It would have been braver, for then he’d have taken his chance of my whipping him for it if I could.”

“Is there soot on my cheek, Bibbs, or were you only saying so rhetorically?  Is there?”

“Is there?  There are soot on your cheeks, Mary—­a fleck on each.  One landed since I mentioned the first.”

She halted immediately, giving him her handkerchief, and he succeeded in transferring most of the black from her face to the cambric.  They were entirely matter-of-course about it.

An elderly couple, it chanced, had been walking behind Bibbs and Mary for the last block or so, and passed ahead during the removal of the soot.  “There!” said the elderly wife.  “You’re always wrong when you begin guessing about strangers.  Those two young people aren’t honeymooners at all—­they’ve been married for years.  A blind man could see that.”

“I wish I did know who threw that soot on you,” said Bibbs, looking up at the neighboring chimneys, as they went on.  “They arrest children for throwing snowballs at the street-cars, but—­”

“But they don’t arrest the street-cars for shaking all the pictures in the houses crooked every time they go by.  Nor for the uproar they make.  I wonder what’s the cost in nerves for the noise of the city each year.  Yes, we pay the price for living in a ‘growing town,’ whether we have money to pay or none.”

“Who is it gets the pay?” said Bibbs.

“Not I!” she laughed.

“Nobody gets it.  There isn’t any pay; there’s only money.  And only some of the men down-town get much of that.  That’s what my father wants me to get.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling to him, and nodding.  “And you don’t want it, and you don’t need it.”

“But you don’t think I’m a sleep-walker, Mary?” He had told her of his father’s new plans for him, though he had not described the vigor and picturesqueness of their setting forth.  “You think I’m right?”

“A thousand times!” she cried.  “There aren’t so many happy people in this world, I think—­and you say you’ve found what makes you happy.  If it’s a dream—­keep it!”