486
"PARTISAN REVIEW
the Egyptian rooms of the Museum, repeatedly entering and emerg–
ing from and entering again the narrow slits of the grave vaults. His
knickerbockers were sliding at the knees and his effort to control a
drop at his nose further compromised but by no means destroyed his
dignity. He had the clear cheeks and well-shaped head of a care–
fully reared child, but he seemed too far from home at
this
hour
quite to be the child of very careful parents. There was an air about
him which suggested that he had learned to expect at least a lit–
tle resistance from the world and that he was ready to meet it.
The conductor did not reply to the second question. He had
taken a large black wallet of imitation leather from some cranny
of the rear platform and was making marks with a pencil on the
cardboard trip-sheet it contained. He was an old man.
"Mister," said the boy again, and his voice, though tense, was
reasonable. It was the very spirit of reasonableness. "Mister, how
much does it cost to ride on this bus? A nickel or a dime?"
The conductor elaborately lifted his eyes from his record. He
looked at the boy not hostilely nor yet quite facetiously, but with a
certain quiet air of settled satisfaction. "What do you want to know
for?" he said.
Elwin wanted to lower the window to tell the boy it was a dime.
But he had waited too long. The conductor put his hand on the bell–
button and gave the driver the signal. The light changed and the bus
began to move.
"Mister!" the boy shouted. He may have been late to his sup–
per but it was not this urgency that made his voice go up so loud and
high. "For God's sake, mister!"
He of course did not bring in God by way of appeal. There was
no longer any hope of his getting an answer. It was rather an expos–
tulation with the unreasonable, the most passionate thing imaginable.
Elwin looked back and saw the boy's hatred still following the con–
ductor and, naturally, not only the conductor but the whole bus.
The conductor had now the modest look of a person who has
just delivered a rebuke which was not only deserved but witty.
Well, Elwin thought, he is an old man and his pride is some–
where involved. Perhaps it was only that he could not at the mo–
ment bring himself to answer a question.
But he believed that in the past it could not have happened.
When he was a boy the conductor might have said, "What do you
want to know for?"-boys must always be teased a little by men.
But the teasing would have stopped in time for him to board the bus.
The bus was peculiarly safe. The people who rode in it and paid a
