ell back on the sofa, a once lordly thing of yellow satin, now
frayed and faded, to eye the upper reaches of the room. The high,
blue-tinted ceiling was scarred and cracked. Depending from its center a
huge chandelier dangled glittering prisms of glass. An immense mirror in
a gilt frame, lavishly rococo, rested on the mantel of carved white
marble. Heavy lace curtains, shrouding the two broad windows, made a
restful half light.

He had awakened to hills that morning, wooded hills and well towned.
Then had come veritable cities, rich to him with all romance under their
angular, smoky ugliness. And at last had come the real city--the end of
the world and its center. He discovered it beyond a stretch of
white-flecked water alive with strange craft. Its clean, straight,
myriad-windowed towers glowed under a slanting sun in an air as crystal
clear as that of his own hills. A vista of heart-shaking surprises
unfolded ahead of the great boat they boarded, a boat with a heart
strongly beating in tune with his own. Too soon it nosed its way, with a
sort of clumsy finesse, into a pile-walled pocket. There followed the
keen, quick rattling of a cogged wheel and a rush of people who seemed
insufficiently impressed by the magnitude of the event. Then they
entered a cab, to be driven from a throng of other cabs and jostling
pedestrians through the maze of a dream come true. He tried not to
ignore his companion for glimpses of that strange life through the cab
window.

Very casually she had said at parting, "Thank you so much for all your
care of me--and dine with us at seven-thirty, won't you? I shall try to
have a friend here that I think may help you."

A long time he lay, reviewing that chaotic first hour in the world.
Everything throbbed here, it seemed. One lived more quickly. And how
long could the body endure it? Suddenly he felt his own pulses beating
at a rate to terrify. He caught his breath and listened. He could hear
the monstrous beats--they were actually shaking the sofa on which he
lay. He thought of heart disease. He might be dying there--and they
would wait dinner for him. He sprang up desperately. The sinister
beating ceased. He put his hand to his heart, listened tensely, and
heard again that which had alarmed him, the pulsing beat of a steam pump
somewhere far below. In his relief he laughed aloud.

As he set about opening his trunks he was marveling at clothes lines he
had seen stretched high between the rear