Georgie had a little mustache and an income, just enough income to support the little mustache, and he sang inoffensively, and was always winning tennis cups—almost—and he always said, at least once at every party, "The basis of savoir faire is knowing how to be rude to the right people." Fire-enamored and gliding into a perfumed haze of exquisite drowsiness, Claire saw Georgie as heroic and wise. But the firelight got into her eyes, and her lids wouldn't stay open, and in her ears was a soft humming as of a million bees in a distant meadow golden-spangled—and Gene was helping her upstairs; sleepiness submerged her like bathing in sweet waters; she fumbled at buttons and hooks and stays, let things lie where they fell—and of all that luxury nothing was more pleasant than the knowledge that she did not have to take precautions against the rats, mice, cockroaches, and all their obscene little brothers which—on some far-off fantastic voyaging when she had been young and foolish—she seemed to remember having found in her own room. Then she was sinking into a bed like a tide of rainbow-colored foam, sinking deep, deep, deep——
And it was morning, and she perceived that the purpose of morning light was to pick out surfaces of mahogany and orange velvet and glass, and that only an idiot would ever leave this place and go about begging dirty garage men to fill her car with stinking gasoline and oil.
The children were at breakfast—children surely not of the same species as the smeary-cheeked brats she had seen tumbling by roadsides along the way—sturdy Mason, with his cap of curls, and Virginia, with bobbed ash-blond hair prim about her delicate face. They curtsied, and in voices that actually had intonations they besought her, "Oh, Cousin Claire, would you pleasssssse tell us about drive-to-the-coast?"
After breakfast, she went out on the terrace for the View.
In Seattle, even millionaires, and the I. W. W., and men with red garters on their exposed shirt-sleeves who want to give you real estate, all talk about the View. The View is to Seattle what the car-service, the auditorium, the flivver-factory, or the price of coal is to other cities. At parties in Seattle, you discuss the question of whether the View of Lake Union or the View of the Olympics is the better, and polite office-managers say to their stenographers as they enter, "How's your View this morning?" All real-estate deeds include a patent on the View, and every native son has it as his soundest belief that no one in Tacoma gets a View of Mount Rainier.
Mrs. Gilson informed Claire that they had the finest View in Seattle.
Below Claire was the harbor, with docks thrust far out into the water, and steamers alive with smoke. Mrs. Gilson said they were Blue Funnel Liners, loading for Vladivostok and Japan. The names, just the names, shot into Claire's heart a wistful unexpressed desire that was somehow vaguely connected with a Milt Daggett who, back in the Middlewestern mud and rain, had longed for purple mountains and cherry blossoms and the sea. But she cast out the wish, and lifted her eyes to mountains across the sound—not purple mountains, but sheer silver streaked with black, like frozen surf on a desolate northern shore—the Olympics, two-score miles away.
Up there, one could camp, with a boy in a deteriorated sweater singing as he watched the coffee——
Hastily she looked to the left, across the city, with its bright new skyscrapers, its shining cornices and masses of ranked windows, and the exclamation-point of the "tallest building outside of New York"—far livelier than her own rusty Brooklyn. Beyond the city was a dun cloud, but as she stared, far up in the cloud something crept out of the vapor, and hung there like a dull full moon, aloof, majestic, overwhelming, and she realized that she was beholding the peak of Mount Rainier, with the city at its foot like white quartz pebbles at the base of a tower.
A landing-stage for angels, she reflected.