ruthless of their individual happiness. What could they know of art, beauty, leisure, the quiet pools of thought?... Out in Wall Street there was pandemonium. The outside brokers—the curb men—were bidding against one another for stocks not quoted on the New York Exchange—the Standard Oil Company among them—and their hoarse cries mingled in a raucous chorus. I stood outside a madhouse staring at lunatics. Surely it was a madhouse, surrounded by other homes for incurably insane! This particular house was a narrow, not very tall, building of reddish brown brick, like a Georgian house in London, and out of each window, which was barred, poked two rows of faces, one above the other, as though the room inside were divided by a false floor. In the small window-frames sat single figures, in crouched positions, with telephone receivers on their ears and their faces staring at the crowd in the street below. Each one of those human faces, belonging to young men of healthy appearance, was making most hideous grimaces, and each grimace was accompanied by strange, incomprehensible gestures of the man's fingers. With a thumb and two fingers, or a thumb and three fingers, they poked through the windows with violent efforts to attract the notice of individuals in the street. I saw, indeed, that all this fingering had some hidden meaning and that the maniacs as I had first taken them to be were signaling messages to the curb brokers, who wore caps of different colors in order to be distinguished from their fellows. Up and down the street, and from the topmost as well as from the lower stories of many buildings, I saw the grimaces and the gestures of the window-men, and the noise and tumult in the street became more furious. It was a lively day in Wall Street, and I thanked God that my fate had not led me into such a life. It seemed worse than war....

Not really so, after all. It was only the outward appearance of things that distressed one's soul. Looking closer, I saw that all these young men on the curb seemed very cheery fellows, and were enjoying themselves as much as boys in a Rugby "scrum." There was nothing wrong with their nerves. There was nothing wrong with a crowd of young business men and women with whom I sat down to luncheon in a restaurant called Robin's, not far from the Stock Exchange. These were the working-bees of the great hive which is New York. They were in the front-line trenches of the struggle for existence, and they seemed as cheerful as our fighting-men who were always less gloomy than the fellows at the rear in the safe back-waters of war. Business men and lady-clerks, typists, and secretaries, were all mingled at the little tables where the backs of chairs touched, and there was a loud, incessant chatter like the noise of a parrot-house. I overheard some fragments of conversation at the tables close to me.

"They don't seem to be getting on with the Peace Conference," said a young man with large spectacles. "All the little nations are trying to grab a bit of their neighbors' ground."

"I saw the cutest little hat—" said a girl whose third finger was stained with red ink.

"Have you seen that play by Maeterlinck?" asked an elderly man so like President Wilson's portraits that he seemed to be the twin brother of that much-discussed man.

These people were human all through, not at all dehumanized, after all, because they lived maybe on the thirty-first story of a New York skyscraper. I dare say also that their work is not so strenuous as it looks from the outside, and that they earn more dollars a week than business men and women of their own class in England, so that they have more margin for the pleasures of life, for the purchase of a "cute little hat," even for a play by Maeterlinck.

After business hours many of these people hurry away from New York to suburbs, where they get quickly beyond the turmoil of the city in places with bustling little high streets of their own and good shops and, on the outskirts, neat little houses of wooden framework, in gardens where flowers grow between great rocks which crop out of the soil along the Connecticut shore. They are the "commuters," or, as we should say in England, the season-ticket-holders, and, as I did some "commuting" myself during a ten weeks' visit to America, I used to see them make a dash for their trains between five and six in the afternoon or late at night after theater-going in New York. I never tired of the sight of those crowds in the great hall of the Grand Central Terminal or in the Pennsylvania Station, and saw the very spirit of the United States in those vast buildings which typify modern progress. In England a railway station is, as a rule, the ugliest, most squalid place in any great city; but in America it is, even in provincial towns, a great adventure in architecture, where the mind is uplifted by nobility of design and imagination is inspired by spaciousness, light, color, and silence. It is strangely, uncannily quiet in the central hall of the Pennsylvania Station, as one comes down a long broad flight of steps to the vast floor space below a high dome—painted blue like a summer sky, with golden stars atwinkling—uplifted on enormous arches. It is like entering a great cathedral, and, though hundreds of people are scurrying about, there is a hush through the hall because of its immense height, in which all sound is lost, and there is no noise of footsteps and only a low murmur of voices. So it is also in the Grand Central Terminal, where I found myself many times before the last train left. There is no sign of railway lines or engines, or the squalor of sidings and sheds. All that is hidden away until one is admitted to the tracks before the trains start. Instead, there are fruit-stalls and flower-stalls bright with color, and book-stalls piled high with current literature from which every mind can take its choice, and candy-stalls where the aching jaw may find its chewing-gum, and link up meditation with mastication, on the way to New Rochelle—"forty-five minutes from Broadway"—or to the ruralities of Rye, Mamaroneck, and Port Chester, this side of high life in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Some of the male commuters have a habit of playing cards between New York and New Rochelle, showing an activity of mind not dulled by their day's work in town. But others indulge in conversational quartets, and on these journeys I heard more than I wanted to know about the private life of President Wilson, and things I wanted to learn about the experiences of American soldiers in France, the state of feeling between America and England, and the philosophy of success by men who had succeeded. It was a philosophy of simple virtue enforced by will-power and a fighting spirit. "Don't hit often," said one of these philosophers, who began life as an errand-boy and now designs the neckwear of society, "but, when you do, hit hard and clean. No man is worth his salt unless he loses his temper at the right time."

In the last train to Greenwich were American soldiers and mariners just back from France, who slept in corners of the smoking-coach and wakened with a start at New Rochelle, with a dazed look in their eyes, as though wondering whether they had merely dreamed of being home again and were still in the glades of the Argonne forest.... The powder was patchy on the nose of a tired lady whose head drooped on the shoulder of a man in evening clothes chewing an unlighted cigar and thinking, with a little smile about his lips, of something that had happened in the evening. Two typist-girls with their mothers had been to a lecture by Captain Carpenter, V.C., one of the heroes of Zeebrugge.