“You must not expect me to talk,” I said.

We drew up in front of a huge hotel and went into the bar, huge and gorgeous to match, shimmering with white bartenders and a variegated population of men-about-town.  I had never seen such a bar.

“Two Polands and a Scotch highball,” was the order.  Of which geographical language I understood not a word.

“See the fresco,” my particular friend suggested.  And from his tone, at once modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that that nursery-rhyme fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure quarter of New York, and that I ought to admire it.  Well, I did admire it.  I found it rather fine and apposite.  But the free-luncheon counter, as a sight, took my fancy more.  Here it was, the free-luncheon counter of which the European reads—­generously loaded, and much freer than the air.

“Have something?”

I would not.  They could shame me into drinking coffee, but they could not shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at eleven o’clock at night.  The Poland water sufficed me.

We swept perilously off again into the welter.  That same evening three of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one of them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse.  But I went scatheless.  Such are the hazards of life....  We arrived at a terminus.  And it was a great terminus.  A great terminus is an inhospitable place.  And just here, in the perfection of the manner in which my minutest comfort was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate the significance of American hospitality—­that combination of eager good-nature, Oriental lavishness, and sheer brains.  We had time to spare.  Close to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit, for all my straining out of the window of the cab, I had been unable to descry.  I said that I should really like to see the top of that hotel.  No sooner said than done.  I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen.  We went into the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agreeable and lively young dandy bought three cigars out of millions of cigars.  Naught but bank-notes seemed to be current.  The European has an awe of bank-notes, whatever their value.

Then we were in the train, and the train was moving.  And every few seconds it shot past the end of a long, straight, lighted thoroughfare—­scores upon scores of them, with a wider and more brilliant street interspersed among them at intervals.  And I forgot at what hundredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of New York.  I had had the feeling of a vast and metropolitan city.  I thought, “Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank with the best of ’em.”  I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knew the proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real thing.  And I was aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and those mysterious generations who had been gradually and yet so rapidly putting together, girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all unseen by me till then, this illustrious, proud organism, with its nobility and its baseness, its rectitude and its mournful errors, its colossal sense of life.  I liked New York irrevocably.