So Little Time by John P. Marquand

are all like that.” Yet the driver must have had a life of his own. He must have possessed ambitions and some sort of ideology.
    â€œIt takes all kinds to make a world,” he said. “That’s the truth, isn’t it?”
    â€œYes,” Jeffrey said, “I guess you’re right.”
    â€œI know I’m right,” the driver said, “it takes all kinds to make a world.”
    The trouble was that there were too many kinds making up the world in New York. The weight of their numbers made it impossible for you to think of them as individuals; the man was a taxi driver, and Jeffrey was a fare, and the chances were about a thousand to one that they would never meet again, yet back there where he and Walter had come from you knew everything about everybody. Perhaps it was just as well not to know too much.
    â€œGood evening, Mr. Wilson,” the doorman said.
    â€œGood evening,” Jeffrey answered.
    â€œIt’s been a nice day for April,” the doorman said, and then the elevator boy was saying that it was a nice day for April.
    They had said it all a number of times before, the only difference was that Jeffrey was more conscious of it.
    â€œTell me about yourself,” Walter Newcombe had asked him.
    If he had told about himself he would have described ten thousand such rides in taxicabs and elevators. The starter would snap his button or whatever it was that starters snapped; the doors would close. Floors please. Fifth floor out. Going up. Floors please. Watch your step getting out. Floors please.

6
    There’s Everything in New York
    When the elevator stopped, Jeffrey felt in his pocket for his key. Inside, he put his hat on the table beneath the mirror. Then he took off his overcoat and tossed it on one of the chairs in the hall that you never sat on, and then he saw that there was another overcoat and another hat. As he looked at it, he heard voices from the kitchen beyond the dining room. It was the new couple, Albert and Effie, arguing. You could ask that man until you were blue in the face, and still he would never close the pantry door, and when you rang the bell or called, he would never hear because he was either scolding Effie or Effie was scolding him.… There was always something wrong with couples, but as Madge had said, these two were willing to go to the country.
    The hat and coat were familiar, but he could not place them. It was obviously someone waiting to see him, because he knew that Madge was out. It would be someone who wanted to sell something or talk seriously about something or else he wouldn’t have waited. Then a voice called:—
    â€œHello, Pops, is that you?”
    It was the voice of his eldest boy, Jim. Jeffrey hurried past the staircase and into the living room. The armchairs and the sofas had on their chintz slipcovers and there were daffodils in the bowl on the table by the wall, but in spite of those signs of spring the living room still looked very much as it had in winter. There were the same ornaments on the mantelpiece above the fireplace and the same birch logs behind the brass andirons and the same low coffee table in front of the sofa, and the piano, with its piece of damask, and the silver cigarette boxes and the eighteenth-century armchairs which Madge had bought at the Anderson Galleries. The walls and the window curtains, in fact the room itself, seemed temporary, but the furniture was different because it had been in so many other of their rooms that every piece of it was a sort of accepted fact. They had bought the piano when they had lived on Eighteenth Street. The dark refectory table, which stood between the windows, they had bought in an antique shop on the Left Bank in Paris once. It was a fake but they did not know it at the time. The Jacobean chair on one side of it had come from Madge’s family’s house, and so had the sofa. The second time he had ever kissed Madge was when they had been sitting on