And a little while later, between another change of cigarettes, he adds:
"And I may not come back on my ticket. I understand—that reporters get fifteen or twenty dollars a week on the New York city papers."
Paul's collar is impossible and his appetite for cigarettes fiendish, but he has ambitions. Perhaps he shares the ambitions of the city which, old in heart and traditions, is new in enterprise and hope, and looks forward to being the mighty gateway of the greatest of all English great possessions—a city filled with more than a million folk.
*****
We pass through the splendors of Victoria square and up the steep turn of Beaver Hall Hill into Phillips square and smart Ste. Catherine street. In a general way, the French element have preëmpted the eastern end of the city for themselves, while the English-speaking portion of the population clings to the section north and west of Phillips square and Ste. Catherine street right up to the first steep slopes of Mount Royal. This part of the city looks like any smart, progressive British town—with its fine Gothic Cathedral of the Church of England facing its showy main street, its exclusive clubs and its great hotels. And nowadays smart modern restaurants are also crowding upon Ste. Catherine street, for modern Montreal will proudly tell you, and tell you again and again, that it is more continental, far more continental than London, which in turn is tightly bound down by the traditions of English conservatism. Montreal is not very literary—Toronto surpassing it in that regard—but it has a keen love of good paintings, good art of every sort. It ranks itself next to New York and Boston and among North American cities in this regard.
"We are more proud of our public and private galleries," says the citizen of the town who sips tea at five o'clock with you in the lounge of the Windsor, "than we are of our New Yorkish restaurants that have imported themselves across the line within the past year or two. We have smiled at our daughters drifting in here for their tea on matinée afternoons, but dinners and American cocktails—well there are some sorts of reciprocity that we decidedly do not want."
We understand. Montreal wants her personality, her rare and varied personality, preserved inviolate and intact. That is one great reason why she has cherished the pro-British habits of her press. New York is well enough for a trip—Montreal delights in our metropolis, as she does in our Atlantic City—as mere pleasure grounds, and the Easter hegira, in which Paul is yet to join, grows each year. But New York is New York, and Montreal must be Montreal. With her wealth of tradition, her peculiarly unique conservatism of two languages and two great peoples working out their problems in common sympathy, without conceding a single heritage, one to the other, the city of the gray and green must keep to her own path.