In the morning, when they came down to gulp the cold coffee and sandwiches she had laid out overnight, Vance was astonished to find Laura Lou in the kitchen, in her refurbished yellow muslin, with a becoming shade-hat on her silvery-golden head. "You're going to take me, aren't you? I've warmed the coffee and boiled some eggs for you," she said to Vance in her childish way; and it caused him a pang when Upton, with a brother's brutality, reminded her that she knew Bunty'd only given him two tickets. Her lower lip began to tremble, her big helpless gray eyes to fill: Vance asked himself with inward vexation whether he ought to surrender his ticket to this tiresome child. But before he had made up his mind Upton cut short his sister's entreaties. "We're going with a lot of fellows: you know Mother wouldn't hear of it. What's all the fuss about anyway? You've got that school picnic this afternoon. That's what you were doing up your dress for yesterday. Don't you take any notice of her, Vance." She ran from the room, crimson and half crying; and Vance ate his eggs with compunction and relief. He didn't want any girl on his hands the first day he saw New York… .

They were there only a couple of hours, and there was no use trying to hunt up an editor. The most he could achieve was a distant view of the most notable skyscrapers, a gasp at Fifth Avenue and a dip into Broadway, before dashing to the Pennsylvania Station for the Jersey train. From that moment they were caught up in the baseball crowd, a crowd of which he had never seen the like. Life became a perspiring struggle, a struggle for air, for a foothold, for a sight of anything but the hot dripping napes and shoulder blades that hemmed them in. Finally, somehow, they had reached the field, got through the gates, found their places, discovered Bunty Hayes nearby with a crowd of congenial spirits, and settled down to the joys of spectatorship—or such glimpses of it as their seats permitted. It was a comfort to Vance to reflect that he had been right not to give his ticket to Laura Lou; such a frail creature could hardly have come alive out of the battle.