We did not land at New York, but at Jersey City, where a special train was waiting to carry us to Washington. It would have taken us in Spain twenty-four hours to go the distance; we covered it in five hours, and I did not feel shaken. In Spain, if luncheon had been served us on the train it would have been “to kill time”; here it was served us “to save time.” One was struck at once by the busyness of the life and its efficiency. We had been caught up by an organisation that transported us, fed us, housed us, delivered us into the hands of a host or at the doors of an entertainment, returned us to our hotel, took us on excursions, provided us with drives, protected us from intrusion, conducted us through crowds, intelligently, suavely, without any hitch, comfortably, almost invisibly, with a foresight that seemed to provide for every contingency that could happen, and to be prepared for any change of plan that we could wish. And the spectacle of the life, through which we hurried, had the same air of having conquered the material agents of existence to the same end; namely, that every one should get as much as possible done in a day with as little friction as possible in the mechanical means of doing it.
From some of the Americans whom I have seen abroad I had not got a very happy impression, and now I understood why. They had been out of their element; they had left at home their reason for being. The women, for example, were less conspicuously dressed than some I had seen in Paris, and less nervously self-assertive; and the men were more easy and more natural. They were not on the defensive among foreigners whom they felt to be critical, or whom they desired to impress. They were not blatant nor apologetic. They were happy, intelligent, hospitable, and altogether engaging. I found no one with whom conversation was not instantly possible; and the volubility of my conversations was a matter of amused comment with our suite. The truth was that I was not only sympathetically interested in all I saw and eager to talk about it, I was also at once aware of the friendliness of the eyes that watched and listened; and I talked, and my _vis-à-vis_ talked, without any awkwardness of restraint.