owledge that she did not have to take
precautions against the rats, mice, cockroaches, and all their obscene
little brothers which--on some far-off fantastic voyaging when she had
been young and foolish--she seemed to remember having found in her own
room. Then she was sinking into a bed like a tide of rainbow-colored
foam, sinking deep, deep, deep----

And it was morning, and she perceived that the purpose of morning light
was to pick out surfaces of mahogany and orange velvet and glass, and
that only an idiot would ever leave this place and go about begging
dirty garage men to fill her car with stinking gasoline and oil.

The children were at breakfast--children surely not of the same species
as the smeary-cheeked brats she had seen tumbling by roadsides along the
way--sturdy Mason, with his cap of curls, and Virginia, with bobbed
ash-blond hair prim about her delicate face. They curtsied, and in
voices that actually had intonations they besought her, "Oh, Cousin
Claire, would you pleasssssse tell us about drive-to-the-coast?"

After breakfast, she went out on the terrace for the View.

In Seattle, even millionaires, and the I. W. W., and men with red
garters on their exposed shirt-sleeves who want to give you real estate,
all talk about the View. The View is to Seattle what the car-service,
the auditorium, the flivver-factory, or the price of coal is to other
cities. At parties in Seattle, you discuss the question of whether the
View of Lake Union or the View of the Olympics is the better, and polite
office-managers say to their stenographers as they enter, "How's your
View this morning?" All real-estate deeds include a patent on the View,
and every native son has it as his soundest belief that no one in Tacoma
gets a View of Mount Rainier.

Mrs. Gilson informed Claire that they had the finest View in Seattle.

Below Claire was the harbor, with docks thrust far out into the water,
and steamers alive with smoke. Mrs. Gilson said they were Blue Funnel
Liners, loading for Vladivostok and Japan. The names, just the names,
shot into Claire's heart a wistful unexpressed desire that was somehow
vaguely connected with a Milt Daggett who, back in the Middlewestern mud
and rain, had longed for purple mountains and cherry blossoms and the
sea. But she cast out the wish, and lifted her eyes to mountains across
the sound--not purple mountains, but sheer silver streaked with black,
like frozen surf on a desolate northern shor