ed handbags airily aside with false geniality.
The highways, repeating a pattern I had cause to know so well, were
nearly impassable with brokendown cars and other litter. The streets of
Queens, cluttered with wreckage and refuse, were bounded by houses in a
state of apathetic disrepair whose filthy windows refused to look upon
the scene before them. The great bridges over the East River were not
being properly maintained as an occasional snapped cable, hanging over
the water like a drunken snake, showed; it was dangerous to cross them,
but there was no other way. The ferryboats had long since broken down.

At the door of my hotel, where I had long been accustomed to just the
right degree of courteous attention, a screaming mob of men and boys
wrapped in careless rags to keep out the cold, their unwashed skins
showing where the coverings had slipped, begged abjectly for the
privilege of carrying my bags. The carpet in the lobby was wrinkled and
soiled and in the great chandeliers half the bulbs were blackened.
Though the building was served by its own powerstation, the elevators no
longer ran, and the hot water was rationed, as in a fifthrate French
pension. The coverlet on the bed was far from fresh, the window was
dusty and there was but one towel in the bathroom. I was glad I had not
brought my man along for him to sneer silently at an American luxury
hotel.

I picked up the telephone, but it was dead. I think nothing gave me the
feeling that civilization as we knew it had ended so much as the blank
silence coming from the dull black earpiece. This, even more than the
automobile, had been the symbol of American life and activity, the
essential means of communication which had promoted every business deal,
every social function, every romance; it had been the first palliation
of the sickbed and the last admission of the mourner. Without telephones
we were not even in the horse and buggy days--we had returned to the
oxcart. I replaced the receiver slowly in its cradle and looked at it a
long minute before going back downstairs.

_57._ I had come home on a quixotic and more or less unbusinesslike
mission. It had long been the belief of Consolidated Pemmican's chemists
that the Grass might possibly furnish raw material for food concentrates
and we had come to modify our opinion about the necessity for a
processing plant in close proximity. However, at secondhand, no
practicable formula had been evolved. Strict laws a