"No homes left?——"
"I didn't say 'home'—I said 'kitchen.' Brace up, old man! We still eat—and better food than you ever dreamed of in your hungriest youth."
"That's a long story," Nellie here suggested. "We mustn't crowd him. Let's get washed and rested a bit, and have some of that food you're boasting of."
They gave me a room with a river window, and I looked out at the broad current, changed only in its lovely clearness, and at the changeless Palisades.
Changeless? I started, and seized the traveling glass still on the strap.
The high cliffs reached away to the northward, still wooded, though sprinkled with buildings; but the more broken section opposite the city was a picture of startling beauty.
The water front was green-parked, white-piered, rimmed with palaces, and the broken slopes terraced and garlanded in rich foliage. White cottages and larger buildings climbed and nestled along the sunny slopes as on the cliffs at Capri. It was a place one would go far to see.
I dropped my eyes to the nearer shore. Again the park, the boulevard, the gracious outlines of fine architecture.
It was beautiful—undeniably beautiful—but a strange world to me. I felt like one at a play. A plain, ordinary American landscape ought not to look like a theatre curtain!