Beyond the end of this building was a vacant lot and Great Taylor moved more swiftly with head averted.  She had passed nearly to the next building before she stopped and wheeled around defiantly.  “I ain’t afraid to look,” she said to herself and gazed across at Grit’s junk-cart, with its string of bells, partly concealed back against the fence.  It was standing in the shadow, silent, unmanned.  She walked on for a few steps and turned again.  The cart was standing as before, silent, unmanned.  She stood there, hands on her hips, trying to visualize Grit drooping over the handle—­his collarless neck, his grimy face and baggy breeches; but her imagination would not paint the picture.  “Grit’s gone for good,” she said.  “Why couldn’t he been clean like other people, like the man that owns the Garden?  No excuse for being dirty and always tired like that.  Anybody could push it and keep clean, too—­half clean, anyway.”  She slipped a glance at the clock.  It stood at twenty minutes before the hour of her appointment.  “A baby could push it....”

She picked her way across the vacant lot to the junk-cart and laid her hand upon the grimy handle.  The thing moved.  The strings of bells set up a familiar jingle.  “Easy as a baby carriage!” And Great Taylor laughed.  The cart reached the sidewalk, bumped down over the curb and pulling Great Taylor with it went beyond the centre of the street.  She tried to turn back but a clanging trolley car cut in between her and the curb, a wheel of the junk-cart caught in the smooth steel track and skidded as if it were alive with a stupid will of its own.  “It ain’t so easy,” she admitted.  With a wrench she extracted the wheel, narrowly avoided an elevated post and crashed head on into a push-cart, laden with green bananas resting on straw.  An Italian swore in two languages and separated the locked wheels.

Hurriedly Great Taylor shoved away from the fruit man and became pocketed in the traffic.  Two heavy-hoofed horses straining against wet leather collars crowded her toward the curb and shortly the traffic became blocked.  She looked for a means of escape and had succeeded in getting one wheel over the curb when a man touched her on the arm.  “Someone is calling from the window up there,” he said in a low weary voice like Grit’s.  Nell swung around, gasping, but the man had moved away down the sidewalk and a woman was calling to her from a second-story window.

“How much?” called the woman, waving a tin object that glinted in the sunlight.  Great Taylor stared stupidly.  “Clothes boiler,” yelled the woman.  “Fifty cents....  Just needs soldering.”  “What?” stammered Nell.  “Fifty cents,” shouted the woman in the window.  And something prompted Great Taylor to reply, “Give you a dime.”

“Quarter,” insisted the woman.  “Dime ...  Ten cents,” repeated Great Taylor, somewhat red in the face.  “Once I set a price I’m a ...”  But the woman’s head had disappeared and her whole angular person soon slid out through the doorway.  Entirely befogged, Great Taylor fumbled in her patent-leather bag with its worsted fruit, discovered two nickels, and placed the leaky boiler beside the rusty scales on the junk-cart.