behind him.

"Damn white stuff!" He hunched his shoulders more, pulled his neck down into the folds of his collar. "Puts a pure clean blanket over the whole world—but all you have to do is walk on it and you can see the dirt underneath!"

George climbed the steps to the elevated, bought a ticket to anywhere. Then he sat down and waited for a train.

There was a girl waiting with him. She was pretty. George watched her until the train pulled in, wondering what she was doing wandering around Chicago at this time of night.

She got on the train with him, sat down in the seat across from him. The train whined into motion.

"Hello," she said after a while.

"Hello," he replied, startled by her voice. People on elevated trains don't go around saying "hello" to each other!

"Do you mind awfully much if I talk to you?"

"Go ahead." Nor, he thought, do they ask such questions of strange men.

"Do you ever get lonely here in Chicago?"

George smiled. "Sometimes," he said. "You lonely, kid?"

"Awfully. I like to talk to strangers. Then I don't feel quite so lonely."

"Oh."

She was quiet for a minute, her eyes friendly, but her trim body stiff against the city.

"Don't let the town get you down, kid." He was giving her advice!

She looked at him wistfully. "Maybe it's not so bad. Only the people who are fitted to live in a world like this keep on living. There are a lot of people who don't see it the way we do."

"Could be." She was a strange girl, he thought, to be talking this way. Young, pretty, and fed up already. "Why do you ride the El at night?" he asked.

She smiled. "I can meet people—other lonely people—who don't know me and don't want to pry. I can talk to people, and learn things. And then I never 

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