This sight of Canaan from Pisgah-height was no luxury to the taxi-driver, and he hustled his coffee-grinder till he reached Rosslyn once more, crossed the Potomac’s many-tinted stream, and rattled through Georgetown and the shabby, sleeping little shops of M Street into the tree-tunnels of Washington.
He paused to say, “Where do we go from here?”
Davidge and Marie Louise looked their chagrin. They still had no place to go.
“To the Pennsylvania Station,” said Davidge. “We can at least get breakfast there.”
The streets of Washington are never so beautiful as at this still hour when nothing stirs but the wind in the trees and the grass on the lawns, and hardly anybody is abroad except the generals on their bronze horses fronting their old battles with heroic eyes. The station outside was something Olympic but unfrequented. Inside, it was a vast cathedral of untenanted pews.
Davidge paid the driver a duke’s ransom. There was no porter about, and he carried Marie Louise’s suit-cases to the parcel-room. Her baggage had had a long journey. She retreated to the women’s room for what toilet she could make, and came forth with a very much washed face. Somnambulistic negroes took their orders at the lunch-counter.
Marie Louise had weakly decided to return to New York 116 again, but the hot coffee was full of defiance, and she said that she would make another try at Mrs. Widdicombe as soon as a human hour arrived.
And she showed a tactfulness that won much respect from Davidge when she said:
“Do get your morning paper and read it. I’m sure I have nothing to say that I haven’t said, and if I had, it could wait till you find out how the battle goes in Europe.”
He bought her a paper, too, and they sat on a long bench, exchanging comments on the news that made almost every front page a chapter in world history.