There was a heavy town-fog that afternoon, a smoke-mist, densest in the sanctuary of the temple.  The people went about in it, busy and dirty, thickening their outside and inside linings of coal-tar, asphalt, sulphurous acid, oil of vitriol, and the other familiar things the men liked to breathe and to have upon their skins and garments and upon their wives and babies and sweethearts.  The growth of the city was visible in the smoke and the noise and the rush.  There was more smoke than there had been this day of February a year earlier; there was more noise; and the crowds were thicker—­yet quicker in spite of that.  The traffic policeman had a hard time, for the people were independent—­they retained some habits of the old market-town period, and would cross the street anywhere and anyhow, which not only got them killed more frequently than if they clung to the legal crossings, but kept the motormen, the chauffeurs, and the truck-drivers in a stew of profane nervousness.  So the traffic policemen led harried lives; they themselves were killed, of course, with a certain periodicity, but their main trouble was that they could not make the citizens realize that it was actually and mortally perilous to go about their city.  It was strange, for there were probably no citizens of any length of residence who had not personally known either some one who had been killed or injured in an accident, or some one who had accidentally killed or injured others.  And yet, perhaps it was not strange, seeing the sharp preoccupation of the faces—­the people had something on their minds; they could not stop to bother about dirt and danger.

Mary Vertrees was not often down-town; she had never seen an accident until this afternoon.  She had come upon errands for her mother connected with a timorous refurbishment; and as she did these, in and out of the department stores, she had an insistent consciousness of the Sheridan Building.  From the street, anywhere, it was almost always in sight, like some monstrous geometrical shadow, murk-colored and rising limitlessly into the swimming heights of the smoke-mist.  It was gaunt and grimy and repellent; it had nothing but strength and size—­but in that consciousness of Mary’s the great structure may have partaken of beauty.  Sheridan had made some of the things he said emphatic enough to remain with her.  She went over and over them—­and they began to seem true:  “Only one girl he could feel that sorry for!” “Gurney says he’s got you on his brain so bad—­” The man’s clumsy talk began to sing in her heart.  The song was begun there when she saw the accident.

She was directly opposite the Sheridan Building then, waiting for the traffic to thin before she crossed, though other people were risking the passage, darting and halting and dodging parlously.  Two men came from the crowd behind her, talking earnestly, and started across.  Both wore black; one was tall and broad and thick, and the other was taller, but noticeably slender.  And Mary caught her breath, for they were Bibbs and his father.  They did not see her, and she caught a phrase in Bibbs’s mellow voice, which had taken a crisper ring:  “Sixty-eight thousand dollars?  Not sixty-eight thousand buttons!” It startled her queerly, and as there was a glimpse of his profile she saw for the first time a resemblance to his father.