After breakfast, she went out on the terrace for the View.
In Seattle, even millionaires, and the I. W. W., and men with red
garters on their exposed shirt-sleeves who want to give you real estate,
all talk about the View. The View is to Seattle what the car-service,
the auditorium, the flivver-factory, or the price of coal is to other
cities. At parties in Seattle, you discuss the question of whether the
View of Lake Union or the View of the Olympics is the better, and polite
office-managers say to their stenographers as they enter, "How's your
View this morning?" All real-estate deeds include a patent on the View,
and every native son has it as his soundest belief that no one in Tacoma
gets a View of Mount Rainier.
Mrs. Gilson informed Claire that they had the finest View in Seattle.
Below Claire was the harbor, with docks thrust far out into the water,
and steamers alive with smoke. Mrs. Gilson said they were Blue Funnel
Liners, loading for Vladivostok and Japan. The names, just the names,
shot into Claire's heart a wistful unexpressed desire that was somehow
vaguely connected with a Milt Daggett who, back in the Middlewestern mud
and rain, had longed for purple mountains and cherry blossoms and the
sea. But she cast out the wish, and lifted her eyes to mountains across
the sound--not purple mountains, but sheer silver streaked with black,
like frozen surf on a desolate northern shore--the Olympics, two-score
miles away.
Up there, one could camp, with a boy in a deteriorated sweater singing
as he watched the coffee---Hastily she looked to the left, across the city, with its bright new
skyscrapers, its shining cornices and masses of ranked windows, and the
exclamation-point of the "tallest building outside of New York"--far
livelier than her own rusty Brooklyn. Beyond the city was a dun cloud,
but as she stared, far up in the cloud something crept out of the vapor,
and hung there like a dull full moon, aloof, majestic, overwhelming, and
she realized that she was beholding the peak of Mount Rainier, with the
city at its foot like white quartz pebbles at the base of a tower.
A landing-stage for angels, she reflected.
It did seem larger than dressing-tables and velvet hangings and scented
baths.
But she dragged herself from the enticing path of that thought, and
sighed wretchedly, "Oh, yes, he would appreciate Rainier, but how--how
would he manage a grape-fruit? I mustn't be a fool! I mustn't!" She saw
that Mrs. Gilson was peeping at her, and she made herself say adequate
things about the View before she fled inside--fled from her sputtering
inquiring self.
In the afternoon they drove to Capitol Hill; they dropped in at various
pretty houses and met the sort of people Claire knew back home. Between
people they had Views; and the sensible Miss Boltwood, making a
philosophic discovery, announced to herself, "After all, I've seen just
as much from this limousine as I would from a bone-breaking Teal bug.
Silly to make yourself miserable to see things. Oh yes, I will go
wandering some more, but not like a hobo. But---- What can I say to him?
Good heavens, he may be here any time now, with our car. Oh,
why--why--why was I insane on that station platform?"