achinery was in running order. Yet it seemed to him that, making
all allowances for confusion and noise and choked streets and the
rest, underneath it all was a spirit strangely and drearily
unlike that to which he was becoming accustomed in Europe. The
very faces of the people seemed different.

He stopped for a while in the quarter to which the English had
been assigned--that which in old Boston had been, he learned,
the Italian quarter. Here, in the little square where he halted,
everything was surprisingly in order. The open space, paved with
concrete, was unoccupied by any signs of moving in; the houses
were trim and neat, new painted for the most part; and people
seemed to be going about their business with an air of quiet
orderliness. Certainly American arrangements, he thought, were
marvellously efficient, enabling as they did some fifteen
hundred persons to settle down into new houses within the space
of four days. (He had learned something, while he sat on the
central board, of the elaborate system of tickets and officials
and enquiry offices by which such miraculous swiftness had been
made possible.)

Here at least they were an orderly population, going in and out of
the houses, visiting in one corner of the square the vast general
store that had been provided beforehand, presenting their pledges,
which, at any rate for the present, were to take the place of the
European money that the emigrants had brought with them.

He halted the car here, and leaning forward, began to look
round him carefully.

The first thing that struck him was a negative emotion--a
sense that something external was lacking. He presently
perceived what this was.

In European towns, one of the details to which he had become by
now altogether accustomed was the presence, in every street or
square at which he looked, of some emblem or statue or picture of
a religious nature. Here there was nothing. The straight
pavements ran round the square; the straight houses rose from
them, straight-windowed and straight-doored. All was admirably
sanitary and clean and wholesome. He could see through the
windows of the house opposite which his car was drawn up the
clean walls within, the decent furniture, and the rest. But there
was absolutely nothing to give a hint of anything beyond bodily
health and sanitation and decency. In London, or Lourdes, or Rome
there would at least have been a reminder--to put it very
mildly--of other possibilities