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two or three bands playing at the same time—and people, some of ’em very grand, and some just ordinary folk, walking around the gallery upstairs, eating oysters and drinking champagne, or beer if they wantedit. It wasn’t a bad place, d’you mind, but you could spend hours there just looking and not have anything to show for it at the end, and your money all spent. Ah well, I was young then and had all the time in the world. I’d like to see it again, though, and I can’t say otherwise.” He drew a deep breath here and expelled a sigh that sealed the windows again in mist.
    â€œAnd the painting, Papa?” she asked in a very loud voice over the noise of the motor. “What was the painting on the canvas, the roof of that place?”
    â€œThe painting? Oh, I don’t remember rightly, just colors I think, but colors as you don’t see every day. Well, I tell you what it was, it was like that place we saw with your mother, in Italy. What do you call it? Hercules?”
    â€œHerculaneum. The baths at Herculaneum,” said Toma.
    â€œThat’s the very place. Stones, they were, but the same colors as I think now. She loved that, your mother, though I’m sure she never saw the Hippodrome here, more’s the pity. You, young man, is that where you come from?”
    â€œNo, sir, not from Herculaneum. But I was there with you.”
    â€œSo you were, so you were.”
    Harriet, at the mention of Herculaneum, sat back in her own seat, her eyes fixed straight ahead at the trackless white of the avenue. She relinquished Toma’s hand. They wondered, separately, at this sudden turn in the conversation.
    â€œWell then, young man, I think we’d best drive on.”
    The Packard moved away from the curb, and the snow had now reached a depth and consistency that caused the driving wheels to spin until they found the grit on the cobbles. Toma, sensitive to the limits of any machine, knew that their journey was nearly at an end. Bigelow felt it as well.
    â€œA pity we haven’t that weight of iron back here still. We might get all the way home and we did.”
    â€œHow far is that, sir?”
    â€œOnly a hundred miles or so, and there’s gasoline aplenty in the jerry can behind. What do you think, young man?”
    â€œI think we must stop. There is great danger in this.”
    As if to confirm this judgement, a trolley car rumbled past them, headed south at a crawl, causing snow and an explosion of sparks to cascade from the overhead wires like a fireworks display.
    â€œTurn the car, then, if you can. You’ll go around the square and come by that big hotel on the south end. We’ll see about some dinner and a good bed.”
    Â 
    T OMA’S BED THAT NIGHT was the backseat of the Packard. Coatless and shivering in spite of the sleeveless pullover of heavy boiled wool, he buried himself in a loose pile of his other garments, where his breath, trapped in haphazard layers of fustian, twill, and linsey-woolsey, warmed him, made him drowsy, released the odors trapped there. The sharpest smell was that of charred insulation from the cable that had failed in Stephenson’s new prototype subway car. The white smoke tasted like fear. It had been an awful job today heaving the remains of that car, parts of it still warm, off onto a side track where they could pick it apart and see where the junction box had failed, the connections looking more like popped corn than bits of metal. It was those pieces he had been carrying back to show Stephenson, and a half length of the worthless cable too, when he had found Boylan at the window of the Packard, smiling at her, kissing the back of his hand.
    There was another scent, heavier and older, less insistent than that of the burnt insulation but more troubling to Toma’s empty stomach. Three days ago he had been taken to dinner by Mr. Stephenson, who knew something of his life and had done him other