hostility, for the old defiance of
Britain is a thing now ridiculous and dead; and everyone I met had an
air as if he knew that to-morrow must be different from to-day and
different and novel and remarkable by virtue of himself and such as
himself.

I went about New York, with the incredulous satisfaction of a man who
has long doubted, to find that after all America was coming true. The
very clatter pleased me, the crowds, the camp-like slovenliness, a
disorder so entirely different from the established and accepted
untidiness of China or India. Here was something the old world had never
shown me, a new enterprise, a fresh vigor. In the old world there is
Change, a mighty wave now of Change, but it drives men before it as if
it were a power outside them and not in them; they do not know, they do
not believe; but here the change is in the very blood and spirit of
mankind. They breathe it in even before the launch has brought their
feet to Ellis Island soil. In six months they are Americanized. Does it
matter that a thing so gigantic should be a little coarse and blundering
in detail, if this stumbling giant of the new time breaks a gracious
relic or so in his eager clutch and treads a little on the flowers?

Sec. 9

And in this setting of energy and activity, towering city life and
bracing sea breezes, I met Gidding again, whom I had last seen departing
into Egypt to look more particularly at the prehistoric remains and the
temples of the first and second dynasty at Abydos. It was at a
dinner-party, one of those large gatherings that welcome interesting
visitors. It wasn't, of course, I who was the centre of interest, but a
distinguished French portrait painter; I was there as just any guest. I
hadn't even perceived Gidding until he came round to me in that
precious gap of masculine intercourse that ensues upon the departure of
the ladies. That gap is one of the rare opportunities for conversation
men get in America.

"I don't know whether you will remember me," he said, "but perhaps you
remember Crete--in the sunrise."

"And no end of talk afterwards," I said, grasping his hand, "no end--for
we didn't half finish. Did you have a good time in Egypt?"

"I'm not going to talk to you about Egypt," said Gidding. "I'm through
with ruins. I'm going to ask you--you know what I'm going to ask you."

"What I think of America. It's the same inevitable question. I think
everything of it. It's the stepping-off place. I've