Steve nodded his
comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then. But
they found conversation somehow less easy after that. It was not until
they had traversed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red
and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's
lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the
girl regained in part her former vivacity.
Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years. A railroad
station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by
the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the
south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty
odd miles below. And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of
the town was different. The men still swarmed in on the drives,
brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty
wide streets. Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their
prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque
simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once
mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish. The
dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too
sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely
the change which had taken place. Even the vices of the older
Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more
complicated, too.
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