'No doubt about my being an American born, Moreton,' he observed. 'The first night in New York is always a real home-coming to me. And this is New York, isn't it?' he went on, musingly, 'city of steel and iron, typical, indescribable.'
Jim Moreton, an erstwhile college friend and now a prosperous lawyer, nodded sympathetically.
'We are right in the heart of things here,' he assented. 'Nothing like a roof garden round about Broadway, to see us at home. I wonder whether you noticed any change?' he went on. 'They tell us that we get more European every year in our love of pleasure and luxury.'
Lavendale glanced around at the many little groups dining on the twenty-eighth storey of a famous hotel, under the light of the big, yellow moon. The table illuminations, and the row of electric lights which ran along the parapet, seemed strangely insignificant. Everywhere was a loud murmur of conversation, punctuated by much feminine laughter, the incessant popping of corks, the music of the not too insistent band.
'I tell you, Jimmy,' he confided, leaning forward towards his friend, 'to look into the faces of these people is the greatest relief I have known for twelve months. Just at first, when war broke out, one didn't notice much change, in England especially, but latterly there has been no mistaking it. Wherever you went, in the streets or the restaurants, you could see the writing in the faces of the people, a sort of dumb repression of feeling, just as though they were trying to get through the task of every-day life because they had to, eating and drinking because they had to, talking, amusing themselves, even, with an absent feverishness all the time—unnatural. I tell you it's like being in some sort of a dream to be in London or Paris to-day. It's only to-night I've felt myself back amongst real men and women again, and it's good.'
Moreton nodded understandingly.
'A fellow was writing something of the sort in one of the Sunday papers last week,' he remarked. 'Over here, of course, the whole thing to us is simply pictorial. We don't realize or appreciate what is happening. We can't.'
'And yet some day,' Lavendale sighed, 'we shall have to go through it ourselves.'
'One of your Harvard theories cropping up again!'
'It's more than a theory now—it's a certainty,' Lavendale insisted. 'One doesn't need to brood, though. There's plenty of real life buzzing around us all the time. Do you know why I sent you that wireless, Jim?'