He watched a steamer plowing her way southward in the middle of the stream. He liked her air of quiet self-possession and of power. He wondered whence she was coming, whither she was going, and what she was doing it for. He couldn't guess.
"That'd be like me," he said, silently, "sailing from I don't know where--sailing _to_ I don't know where----"
Ten years later he finished this thought, repeating exactly the same words. Just now he couldn't finish anything, because there was so much to see. Little towns perched above little harbors. Fishermen angled from little piers. A group of naked boys, shameless as young mermen, played in the water. On a rock a few yards from the shore a flock of gulls jostled each other for standing room. A motor boat puffed. Yachts rode sleepily at anchor. The car which, when they took it at Harfrey had been almost empty, was beginning to fill with the earlier hordes of commuters. Soon it was quite full. Soon there were cheery young people, most of them chewing gum, standing in the passageway. Having rounded the curve at Spuyten Duyvil, they saw the city looming up, white, spiritual, tremulous, through the morning mist.
Up to this minute he had not thought of plans; now he began to wonder what they should do on reaching the Grand Central, where they would arrive in another quarter of an hour.
"Do we go straight across to the Pennsylvania Station, to take the train for Wilmington, or do we have to wait?"
The answer was unsatisfactory. He looked at his father inquiringly. Looking at him, he was hurt to observe that his confidence was departing, that he was again like something with a broken spring.
"Well, we're going to Wilmington to-day, aren't we?"
"But," the boy cried in alarm, "where can we go, if we don't?"
It was disappointing. The choking sensation which, when he was younger, used to precede tears, began to gather in his throat. Having heard so much from Mrs. Quidmore of the glories of Wilmington, Delaware, he saw it as a city of palaces, of exquisite, ladylike maidens, of noble youths, of aristocratic joyousness. Moreover, he had been told that to get there you went under the river, through a tunnel so deep down in the earth that you felt a distressful throbbing in the head. The postponement of these experiences even for a day was hard to submit to.