"No," he said, "I don't suppose, if you asked a thousand New Yorkers where such and such a ship was loaded, that more than one could tell you. They know the _Lusitania_ lies somewhere about Eighteenth Street and the _Oceanic_'s next to her, and that's about all. It's the same everywhere. Ask a man in the Strand how to get to Tidal Basin; he won't know what Tidal Basin is, let alone _where_ it is. As for an oil-boat--Humph!"
"I shall have your company, then?" I said. He shrugged his shoulders.
"I should like it above all things," I returned. "I was thinking last night that there were many things I should like to ask you, but I was afraid that possibly you might not visit us again for a long time."
"Not at all," he said. "I was very glad to step in. You've got an atmosphere ... if I can call it that. I mean there's something I don't get on a ship, or for that matter, at home ... you understand? Now and again I feel I'd like to talk to people who _do_ understand."
"That reminds me," I said, "that I have been wondering how New York impresses you. I think it is rather wonderful myself."
Mr. Carville smoked silently for a few moments while the card-players pursued their games and the train thundered through the flat swamps of Riverside.
"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."