"Finished up that hideous harbor of yours?"
"No," I answered hungrily, "I think I've just begun." I caught a gleam in her eyes.
"You'll be out of your rut in a moment," she said.
From the little East River corner I'd lived in, we sped far out on the Upper Bay, a rushing black speck on a dim expanse, with dark, empty fields of water around us, long, luminous paths stretching off to the shores, where the lights twinkled low for miles and miles and there were sudden bursts of flame from distant blast furnace fires.
"Tell me what you've been writing about this hideous place," she said.
"Who said it was hideous at night? Of course if you wrap it all up in the dark, so that you can see none of its sea hogs----"
"A sea hog is a wallowing boat with a long, black, heavy snout." And mustering all that was left of my hatred I plunged into my picture. "The whole place is like that," I ended. "Full of smoke and dirt and disorder, everything rushing and jamming together. That's how it looks to me in the daytime!"
"I am," I answered firmly. "And I'm going to write it just as it looks."
Behind us, at the tip of Manhattan, the tall buildings had all melted together into one tremendous mass, with only a pin point of light here and there, a place of shadowy turrets and walls, like some mediæval fortress. Out of it, in contrast to its dimness, rose a garish tower of lights that seemed to be keeping a vigilant watch over all the dark waters, the ships and the docks. The harbor of big companies.
"My father works up in that tower," she said. "He can see the whole harbor spread out below. But he keeps coming down to see it all close, and I've steered him up close to everything in it. You've no idea how much there is." She threw me a glance of pitying scorn. "There are over seven hundred miles of waterfront in this small port, and I'm not going to have you trudging around and getting lost and tired and cross and working off your grudge in your writing. You come with me some afternoon and I'll do what I can to open your eyes."
She took me down, to the sea gate at the end of a warm, still, foggy day. There in the deepening twilight we drifted without a sign of a world around us--till in from the ocean there came a deep billow, then another and another, and as our small craft darted off to one side a gigantic gray shadow loomed through the fog with four black towers of smoke overhead, lights gleaming from a thousand eyes.