He lifted his hand and thoughtfully twirled the scanty locks over one of his ears.
"Here's a letter I got this morning from Hittie." He drew out a small folded sheet from the bottom of a pile of correspondence. "She has about come around to my way of thinking. There don't seem any very good reason for my travelling away down there again, especially when your father and mother are going to move out here anyway. I'm awful busy. She'll have her own family at the wedding, then, and she'll give me a show to scare up some of mine. Things are just too rushing—that's the amount of it."
"I'm glad to have it settled one way or another," George said. "And how about that other affair—have you made any report to father?"
"Yes. That's as good as settled. The deeds are all made out; they've only got to be signed." He reached into one of his pigeon-holes and brought out a bulk of bluish paper whose fractious folds were held in some shape by a wide rubber strap. "Here's one of the abstracts—just come in. The other is a good deal longer and the copy isn't finished. I suppose they'll put that one on a board."
He snapped the band once or twice and put the abstract back again.
"I'm glad," he said, "that your father has finally decided to pull up altogether and to transfer everything to the West. That old block of his was wanting repairs all the time; I don't believe it paid him four per cent. It takes more than soldiers' monuments and musical festivals to make a town move."
George felt his heart give an indignant throb. He seemed to see before him the spokesman of a community where prosperity had drugged patriotism into unconsciousness, and where the bare scaffoldings of materialism felt themselves quite independent of the graces and draperies of culture. It seemed hardly possible that one short month could make his native New England appear so small, so provincial, so left-behind.
"You've got to have snap, go. You've got to have a big new country behind you. How much do you suppose people in Iowa and Kansas and Minnesota think about Down East? Not a great deal. It's Chicago they're looking to. This town looms up before them and shuts out Boston and New York and the whole seaboard from the sight and the thoughts of the West and the North west and the New Northwest and the Far West and all the other Wests yet to be invented. They read our papers, they come here to buy and to enjoy themselves." He turned his thumb towards the ceiling, and gave it an upward thrust that sent it through the six ceilings above it. "If you'd go up on our roof and hear them talking—"
"Oh, well," said George; "hadn't we better get something to eat?"
"And what kind of a town is it that's wanted," pursued McDowell, as he pulled down the cover of his desk, "to take up a big national enterprise and put it through with a rush? A big town, of course, but one that has grown big so fast that it hasn't had time to grow old. One with lots of youth and plenty of momentum. Young enough to be confident and enthusiastic, and to have no cliques and sets full of bickerings and jealousies. A town that will all pull one way. What's New York?" he asked, flourishing his towel from the corner where the wash-stand stood. "It ain't a city at all; it's like London—it's a province. Father Knickerbocker is too old, and too big and logy, and too all-fired selfish. We are the people, right here. Well, Johnny, you hold the fort," he called to a boy who was dividing an open-eyed attention between this oration and his own sandwich; "I've got to have a bite myself."