David straightened up, wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and massaged his left knee. He’d been born with a withered leg and was mildly retarded. “Editor Manly! They throwed him out! Closed down the Record!”

“Manly’s in New Jersey,” Tom Miller said, puzzled.

“That damned editorial,” Norwood said. “We’ll just see about this.”

Ivanhoe Grant sat on Norwood’s desk looking elegant and unsurprised. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and stage-whispered, “The New Jerusalem.”

Halfway back to the Orton Hotel, at the corner of Market and Fourth, Gray Ellen Jenks was nearly knocked down by a colored boy running fast, pumping his fists hard and not stopping for anybody. Immediately, she wondered if he were a thief fleeing a policeman, then scolded herself for jumping to such a conclusion. That was mostly what was wrong with the world, she had decided a long time ago—everybody jumped to conclusions.

The boy ran gimpy, one leg cocked out straight. She watched him disappear up the street, a strange, scuttling figure.

An electric streetcar passed her, and she almost hailed it, to get a break from the muggy heat. It stopped at the corner, and the motorman stepped down to help two young white ladies aboard. When the black woman in line behind them boarded, the motorman stood aside, offering her no assistance. Gray Ellen decided to keep walking.

The lime dust from the oyster-shell paving parched her mouth and stung her eyes. Oyster-shell pavement—who’d ever heard of such a thing? Half the storefronts in town were dusted with it, their paint corroded by the lime, and the public parks were full of hacking children. The whiteness was blinding.

In the black neighborhood she had just come from, the streets were paved—those that were paved at all—with sawdust from the ice ships, spread to keep down the odor of fresh manure. But in neighborhoods like that, the manure didn’t lie in the streets long enough to stop steaming: people rushed out to collect it for their rose gardens, their vegetable plots.

A sudden emptiness overcame her, a hollowness of the spirit: what was she doing here? All she wanted was a baby and a home, and a husband sober enough to give her both. And to work quietly at her profession. Was that so much for a woman to want?

A Negro man and his wife passed her, arm in arm, nodding good day. A black man and a white man strode by her going the other way, too engrossed in their conversation to notice her.

The sidewalks were jammed with well-dressed blacks—lawyers and commercial men. She’d never seen so many Negro professionals mingling with whites in Chicago or Philadelphia. No one here seemed to find it remarkable.