The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air; and a roar and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs’s ears.  And now the car passed two great blocks of long brick buildings, hideous in all ways possible to make them hideous; doorways showing dark one moment and lurid the next with the leap of some virulent interior flame, revealing blackened giants, half naked, in passionate action, struggling with formless things in the hot illumination.  And big as these shops were, they were growing bigger, spreading over a third block, where two new structures were mushrooming to completion in some hasty cement process of a stability not over-reassuring.  Bibbs pulled the rug closer about him, and not even the phantom of color was left upon his cheeks as he passed this place, for he knew it too well.  Across the face of one of the buildings there was an enormous sign:  “Sheridan Automatic Pump Co., Inc.”

Thence they went through streets of wooden houses, all grimed, and adding their own grime from many a sooty chimney; flimsey wooden houses of a thousand flimsy whimsies in the fashioning, built on narrow lots and nudging one another crossly, shutting out the stingy sunlight from one another; bad neighbors who would destroy one another root and branch some night when the right wind blew.  They were only waiting for that wind and a cigarette, and then they would all be gone together—­a pinch of incense burned upon the tripod of the god.

Along these streets there were skinny shade-trees, and here and there a forest elm or walnut had been left; but these were dying.  Some people said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some were sure that asphalt and “improving” the streets did it; but Bigness was in too Big a hurry to bother much about trees.  He had telegraph-poles and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles by the thousand to take their places.  So he let the trees die and put up his poles.  They were hideous, but nobody minded that; and sometimes the wires fell and killed people—­but not often enough to matter at all.

Thence onward the car bore Bibbs through the older parts of the town where the few solid old houses not already demolished were in transition:  some, with their fronts torn away, were being made into segments of apartment-buildings; others had gone uproariously into trade, brazenly putting forth “show-windows” on their first floors, seeming to mean it for a joke; one or two with unaltered facades peeped humorously over the tops of temporary office buildings of one story erected in the old front yards.  Altogether, the town here was like a boarding-house hash the Sunday after Thanksgiving; the old ingredients were discernible.