"We’re going to have to walk from here," Stefana said, and her mother clutched her imitation-leather handbag

"Oh, but we can’t, Fana. Look at that crowd! What are they—Are they—"

"It’s Thursday, ma’am," said a large, red-faced, smiling man just behind them in the aisle. Everybody was getting off the bus, pushing and talking.

"Yesterday, I got four blocks closer than this," a woman said crossly. And the red-faced man said, "Ah, but this is Thursday."

"Fifteen thousand last time," said somebody. And somebody else said, "Fifty, fifty thousand today!"

"We can never get near the Square. I don’t think we should try," Bruna told her daughter as they squeezed into the crowd outside the bus door.

"You stay with me, don’t let go and don’t worry," said the student of Early Romantic Poetry, a tall, resolute young woman, and she took her mother’s hand in a firm grasp. "It doesn’t really matter where we get, but it would be fun if you could see the Square. Let’s try. Let’s go round behind the post office."

Everybody was trying to go in the same direction. Stefana and Bruna got across one street by dodging and stopping and pushing gently, then turning against the flow, they trotted down a nearly empty alley, cut across the cobbled court in back of the Central Post Office and rejoined an even thicker crowd moving slowly down a wide street and out from between the buildings. "There, there’s the palace, see!" said Stefana, who could see it, being taller. "This is as far as we’ll get except by osmosis." They practiced osmosis, which necessitated letting go of each other’s hands and made Bruna unhappy.

"This is far enough, this is fine here," Bruna kept saying.