But it isn’t the standing on cherry-tree ladders, or the doing of any actual thing, that makes the essential difference between the people of the Atlantic and the Pacific Coast. It is the land itself, perhaps—the sunshine, the climate, that pours a rejuvenating radiance upon the spirit of resident and visitor alike.
Even at the end of a little while you find yourself beginning to understand something of the oppressive grayness that settles upon the spirit of every Californian when away from home. Which reminds me of a young Italian girl whom I found one day crying her heart out on a bench in the Public Gardens in Boston. To me Beacon Street is one of the most beautiful streets I have ever seen, especially where the old and most lovely houses face the green of the Public Gardens, and the figure of this sobbing girl was doubly woeful. To every question I could think of she shook her head and sobbed, “No.” She had not lost anyone, no one had deserted her, and she was not hungry, or cold, or houseless, or penniless. “But, my dear, what is the matter?” I implored. Finally, almost strangling with tears, she stammered: “B-boston is so u-ugly!”
Mrs. M., a Californian married to a New Yorker, had seemed to us rather negative, a listless silent figure who trailed through New York drawing-rooms more like a wraith than a live woman. We happened to be at her mother’s when this pale, frail, young person returned home for a visit and came very much to life! She hung cherries on her ears, covered her hat, and filled her belt with poppies, and came running up the terraces of their very wonderful gardens, her arms outstretched and shouting at the top of her voice:
“California, my California! I’m home, home, home!”
The Portico of a California House
Does anyone ever feel like that about New York? I wonder! Does anyone really love its millionaires’ palaces, its flashing Broadway, its canyon streets, its teeming thoroughfares, its subway holes-in-the-ground into which men dive like moles, emerging at the other end in an office burrow—sometimes without coming up into the outdoors at all? Or are the sentiments composed more truly of pride that has much egotism in the consciousness of more square feet of masonry crowded into fewer square feet of ground; more well-dressed women, more automobiles; bigger crowds—sprucer-looking crowds; more electric signs; more things going on; more business; more amusements; more making and spending; more losing and breaking, than, one might almost say, all the other cities of the world together?
All of which makes typical New Yorkers contemptuous of and dissatisfied with every other city. But as to whether they love it, as the people of Chicago or San Francisco do—do they? Do we?