ut Eighteenth Street
and the _Oceanic_'s next to her, and that's about all. It's the same
everywhere. Ask a man in the Strand how to get to Tidal Basin; he won't
know what Tidal Basin is, let alone _where_ it is. As for an
oil-boat--Humph!"

"I shall have your company, then?" I said. He shrugged his shoulders.

"If you don't object, sir," he said.

"I should like it above all things," I returned. "I was thinking last
night that there were many things I should like to ask you, but I was
afraid that possibly you might not visit us again for a long time."

"Not at all," he said. "I was very glad to step in. You've got an
atmosphere ... if I can call it that. I mean there's something I don't
get on a ship, or for that matter, at home ... you understand? Now and
again I feel I'd like to talk to people who _do_ understand."

"That reminds me," I said, "that I have been wondering how New York
impresses you. I think it is rather wonderful myself."

Mr. Carville smoked silently for a few moments while the card-players
pursued their games and the train thundered through the flat swamps of
Riverside.

"Have you ever seen it," he asked, "from the Narrows?"

I shook my head. The _Campania_ had come up in a dank fog, when I had
arrived seven years before. I mentioned the customs formalities that
keep one below at such a time. Mr. Carville smiled gently.

"I always think," he said, "that for an artist, that view is the best,
because it's the first. I was looking at that picture in your friend's
studio last night; that one of New York from Brooklyn, and I couldn't
help noticing how heavy he'd made it. See what I mean? He was too close.
The weight of the buildings gets on one's mind. That's the trouble with
Americans, anyway. They show you a building and tell you the weight of
it, and then the cost of it. Even women are judged by their weight. Only
last night I saw in the papers something about a suffragette. They said
she weighed one hundred and fifty pounds! I think it is a mistake,
myself. Tonnage is all right in a ship; but it doesn't signify much,
either in a city or a woman."

Rather astonished, I agreed that this was sound aesthetic doctrine.

"Now," went on Mr. Carville, "if you ask me how New York impresses me, I
should say that it reminds me of Venice."

The train stopped at Newark. For an instant I was quite unable to
determine whether Mr. Carville was joking or not. One look at his face,
however, precluded any