They made inquiries of a near-by policeman and found that they could reach it by the elevated.  Their encounter with this metropolitan facility for transportation turned out to be among the most memorable bits of sightseeing of their trip.  Neither of the girls had ever imagined anything so lurid as the Saturday noon jam, the dense, packed throngs waiting on the platforms and bursting out through the opened doors like beans from a split bag, their places instantly taken by an even greater crowd, perspiring, fighting grimly for foot-room and expecting and receiving no other kind.  Judith was fired contagiously with the spirit about her, set her teeth, thrust out her elbows, shoved, pushed, grunted, fought, all with a fresh zest in the performance which gave her an immense advantage over the fatigued city-dwellers, who assaulted their fellow-citizens with only a preoccupied desire for an approach to a breathing space, and, that attained, subsided into lurching, strap-hanging quiescence.  Judith secured with ease, on all the public vehicles they utilized that day, a place on the outside edge of a platform, where she had fresh air in abundance and could hang over the grating to watch with extreme interest the intimate bits of tenement-house life which flashed jerkily by.

But Sylvia, a shuddering chip on the torrent, always found herself in the exact middle of the most crowded spot, feeling her body horrifyingly pressed upon by various invisible ones behind her and several only too visible ones in front, breathing down the back of somebody’s neck, often a dirty and sweaty one, with somebody breathing hotly down the back of her own.  Once as a very fat and perspiring German-American began to fight the crowd in the endeavor to turn around and leave the car, his slowly revolving bulbous bulk pushed her so smotheringly into the broad back of a negro ahead of her that she felt faint.  As they left the car, she said vehemently:  “Oh, Mother, this makes me sick!  Why couldn’t we have taken a cab?  Aunt Victoria always does!”

Her mother laughed.  “You little country girl!  A cab for as far as this would cost almost as much as the ticket back to La Chance.”

“I don’t see why we came, then!” cried Sylvia.  “It’s simply awful!  And this is a horrid part of town!” She suddenly observed that they were walking through a very poor, thickly inhabited street, such as she had never seen before.  As she looked about her, her mother stopped laughing and watched her face with a painful attention.  Sylvia looked at the tall, dingy houses, the frowzy little shops, the swarms of dirty-nosed children, shrill-voiced, with matted hair, running and whooping in the street, at the slatternly women yelling unobeyed orders to them out of half-glimpsed, cheerless interiors, smelling of cabbage and dishwater.  It was Sylvia’s first sight of the life of city poor, and upon her face of disgust and revulsion her mother bent a stern and anxious eye.