"Have you ever seen it," he asked, "from the Narrows?"
I shook my head. The Campania had come up in a dank fog, when I had arrived seven years before. I mentioned the customs formalities that keep one below at such a time. Mr. Carville smiled gently.
"I always think," he said, "that for an artist, that view is the best, because it's the first. I was looking at that picture in your friend's studio last night; that one of New York from Brooklyn, and I couldn't help noticing how heavy he'd made it. See what I mean? He was too close. The weight of the buildings gets on one's mind. That's the trouble with Americans, anyway. They show you a building and tell you the weight of it, and then the cost of it. Even women are judged by their weight. Only last night I saw in the papers something about a suffragette. They said she weighed one hundred and fifty pounds! I think it is a mistake, myself. Tonnage is all right in a ship; but it doesn't signify much, either in a city or a woman."
Rather astonished, I agreed that this was sound æsthetic doctrine.
"Now," went on Mr. Carville, "if you ask me how New York impresses me, I should say that it reminds me of Venice."
The train stopped at Newark. For an instant I was quite unable to determine whether Mr. Carville was joking or not. One look at his face, however, precluded any such surmise. I waited until the doors banged and the train was moving before I said, "In what way, Mr. Carville?"
"Mind you, it may not impress you in any way like Venice——"
"I regret never to have been there," I interrupted.
"You may," he assented. "You may. A man can do easy enough without ever seeing Naples; but Venice——ah!"
"Yes, I can imagine that," I said, "but in what way——?"