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fine,” echoed Everhart. “I heard that expression last time . . .”
    â€œGeorge is still sleeping!” interrupted Ginger, bustling around picking up the bottles and things. “He’s a lazy old slop.”
    â€œLast time I heard ‘right fine’ was down in Charlotte, North Carolina,” continued Everhart. “They also used to say, when you wanted to know where something was, that it was ‘right yonder,’ I thought you were from Vermont, Wes?”
    â€œI am,” smiled Wesley. “I been all over this country though; spent two years in the south. Them expressions just come to me.”
    â€œBeen to California?” asked Everhart.
    â€œAll over the place—forty-three states. I guess I missed Dakota, Missouri, Ohio and a few others.”
    â€œWhat were you doing, just loafing around?” inquired Everhart.

    â€œI worked here and there.”
    â€œMy goodness, it’s already ten o’clock!” discovered Ginger. “Let’s eat some breakfast right away! I’ve got to beat it!”
    â€œDo you have any eggs?” asked Everhart.
    â€œOh, hell, no! Eve and I finished them yesterday morning.”
    Polly entered the room in Ginger’s bathrobe, smiling after a shower: “I feel better,” she announced. “Mornin’ Wesley!” She walked to his side and puckered her lips: “Kiss me!” Wesley planted a brief kiss on her lips, then slowly blew a cloud of smoke into her face.
    â€œGive me a drag!” demanded Polly, reaching for his cigarette.
    â€œI’ll go down and buy some eggs and fresh coffee buns,” Everhart told Ginger. “Make some fresh coffee.”
    â€œOkay!”
    â€œComing with me, Wes?” called Everhart.
    Wesley ruffled Polly’s hair and rose to his feet: “Right!”
    â€œCome right back,” said Polly, peering slant-eyed through a cloud of cigarette smoke with a small seductive smile.
    â€œBack right soon!” cried Everhart, slapping Wesley on the back.

    In the automatic elevator, they could still hear the strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” coming from Eve’s radio.
    â€œThat song makes you think of Abe Lincoln and the Civil War,” remembered Everhart. “It does me too, but it also makes me mad. I want to know what the hell went wrong, and who it was inflicted the wrong.” The elevator stopped on the ground floor and slid open its doors. “That old cry ‘America! America’ What in heavens happened to its meaning. It’s as though an America is just that—America—a beautiful word for a beautiful world—until people just simply come to its shores, fight the savage natives, develop it, grow rich, and then lean back to yawn and belch. God, Wes, if you were an assistant instructor in English Literature as I am, with its songs, songs ever saying: ‘Go on! Go on!’ and then you look over your class, look out of the window, and there’s your America, your songs, your pioneer’s cry to brave the West—a roomful of bored bastards, a grimy window facing Broadway with its meat markets and barrooms and God knows the rest. Does this mean frontiers from now on are to be in the imagination?”
    Wesley, it is to be admitted, was not listening too closely: he was not quite certain as to what his friend rambled on about. They were now in the street. Ahead, a colored man was busy disposing of a black pile of coal down
a hole in the sidewalk: the coal flashed back the sun’s morning brilliance like a black hill studded with gems.
    â€œIt certainly does,” Everhart assured himself. “And there is promise in that: but no more romance! No more buckskins and long rifles and coonskins and hot buttered rum at Fort Dearborn, no more trails along the river, no more California. That state is the end of it; if California had stretched around the world back to New England, we might