“Indeed I do. I’ll feel hurt if you don’t.” She held out her hand. There was a naïve simplicity about it all that quite disarmed me and made it all innocent and charming.
“Don’t you think I won’t?” I asked, teasingly. And then as I looked at her she blanched in an odd, disturbed way, and turning to the boy called, “Come on, Billy,” and ran to a side porch door, smiling back at me.
“You won’t forget,” she called back from that safe place.
CHAPTER XLVII
INDIANAPOLIS AND A GLIMPSE OF FAIRYLAND
Indianapolis, the first city on our way south and west, was another like Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, only without the advantage of a great lake shore which those cities possess. It is boasted as one of the principal railroad centers of America, or the world. Good, but what of it? Once you have seen the others, it has nothing to teach you, and I grow tired of the mere trade city devoid of any plan or charm of natural surroundings. The best of the European cities, or of later years, Chicago and New York—Chicago from the lake, vast, frowning giant that it is, and New York, like a pearly cloud lying beyond her great green wet meadows on her sea—ho, Americans, there are two pictures! Travel far and wide, see all that the earth has to show, view Delhi, Venice, Karnak, the sacred temples of the Ganges—there are no such scenes as these. Already one beholds them with a kind of awe, conscious that they may not be duplicated within a thousand or two thousands of years. What could be more astounding than New York’s financial area, or Chicago’s commercial heart!
All that these minor American cities like Indianapolis (and I do not wish to belittle my own state or its capital) have to show is a few high buildings in imitation of New York or Chicago. If any one of them had any natural advantages which would suggest a difference in treatment, they would not follow it. No, no, let us be like Chicago or New York—as like as we may. A few artistic low buildings might have more appeal, but that would not be like New York. A city may even have been laid out perfectly, like Savannah, but do you think it appreciates its difference sufficiently to wish to remain so? Never! Destroy the old, the different, and let’s be like New York! Every time I see one of these tenth-rate imitations, copying these great whales, I want to swear.
Yet, aside from this, Indianapolis was not so bad—not unpleasing in places, really. There is a river there, the White, with which nothing seems to have been done except to build factories on it at one place; but, on the other hand, a creek called Broad Ripple—pretty name, that—has been walled and parked and made most agreeable to look upon.
One or two streets, it seemed to me, were rather striking, lined as they were with pretentious dwellings and surrounded by gardens and enclosed in walls—but, oh, the little streets, the little streets!
“Here is where Senator Fairbanks lives.”
“There is where Benjamin Harrison lived before he became President.”