Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy | Page 5

with him.
The girl at his side--but perhaps we may best let her speak for herself.
Somehow as they sat together on the deck of the great steamer in the
afterglow of the sunken sun, listening to the throbbing of the propeller
(a rare sound which neither of them of course had ever heard before),
de Vere felt that he must speak to her. Something of the mystery of the
girl fascinated him. What was she doing here alone with no one but her
mother and her maid, on the bosom of the Atlantic? Why was she here?
Why was she not somewhere else? The thing puzzled, perplexed him. It
would not let him alone. It fastened upon his brain. Somehow he felt
that if he tried to drive it away, it might nip him in the ankle.
In the end he spoke.
"And you, too," he said, leaning over her deck-chair, "are going to
America?"
He had suspected this ever since the boat left Liverpool. Now at length
he framed his growing conviction into words.
"Yes," she assented, and then timidly, "it is 3,213 miles wide, is it not?"
"Yes," he said, "and 1,781 miles deep! It reaches from the forty-ninth
parallel to the Gulf of Mexico."
"Oh," cried the girl, "what a vivid picture! I seem to see it."

"Its major axis," he went on, his voice sinking almost to a caress, "is
formed by the Rocky Mountains, which are practically a prolongation
of the Cordilleran Range. It is drained," he continued--
"How splendid!" said the girl.
"Yes, is it not? It is drained by the Mississippi, by the St. Lawrence,
and--dare I say it?--by the Upper Colorado."
Somehow his hand had found hers in the half gloaming, but she did not
check him.
"Go on," she said very simply; "I think I ought to hear it."
"The great central plain of the interior," he continued, "is formed by a
vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this
the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in
height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the
watershed falls to the Atlantic."
He was speaking very quietly but earnestly. No man had ever spoken to
her like this before.
"What a wonderful picture!" she murmured half to herself, half aloud,
and half not aloud and half not to herself.
"Through the whole of it," de Vere went on, "there run railways, most
of them from east to west, though a few run from west to east. The
Pennsylvania system alone has twenty-one thousand miles of track."
"Twenty-one thousand miles," she repeated; already she felt her will
strangely subordinate to his.
He was holding her hand firmly clasped in his and looking into her
face.
"Dare I tell you," he whispered, "how many employees it has?"
"Yes," she gasped, unable to resist.

"A hundred and fourteen thousand," he said.
There was silence. They were both thinking. Presently she spoke,
timidly.
"Are there any cities there?"
"Cities!" he said enthusiastically, "ah, yes! let me try to give you a
word-picture of them. Vast cities--with tall buildings, reaching to the
very sky. Why, for instance, the new Woolworth Building in New
York--"
"Yes, yes," she broke in quickly, "how high is it?"
"Seven hundred and fifty feet."
The girl turned and faced him.
"Don't," she said. "I can't bear it. Some other time, perhaps, but not
now."
She had risen and was gathering up her wraps. "And you," she said,
"why are you going to America?"
"Why?" he answered. "Because I want to see, to know, to learn. And
when I have learned and seen and known, I want other people to see
and to learn and to know. I want to write it all down, all the vast
palpitating picture of it. Ah! if I only could--I want to see" (and here he
passed his hand through his hair as if trying to remember) "something
of the relations of labour and capital, of the extraordinary development
of industrial machinery, of the new and intricate organisation of
corporation finance, and in particular I want to try to analyse--no one
has ever done it yet--the men who guide and drive it all. I want to set
down the psychology of the multimillionaire!"
He paused. The girl stood irresolute. She was thinking (apparently, for
if not, why stand there?).
"Perhaps," she faltered, "I could help you."

"You!"
"Yes, I might." She hesitated. "I--I--come from America."
"You!" said de Vere in astonishment. "With a face and voice like yours!
It is impossible!"
The boldness of the compliment held her speechless for a moment.
"I do," she said; "my people lived just outside of Cohoes."
"They couldn't have," he said passionately.
"I shouldn't speak to you like this," the girl