They rode crosstown on the flying train, glimpsing half-lit hovels through grimed windows opened against the heat. The streets below were canals of caps and bonnets bobbing, surging around pushcarts and horsecarts, into and out of shops shadowed by awnings. Eliot felt as if he were riding a magic carpet over an alien island with the population density of a termite mound. Nathaniel yearned to be at sea again, far from the tyranny of people and pavement. Looking through the smoke vented by numberless stacks, toward the steel bones of new buildings rising in the distance, Drew was thrilled. The scene reminded him of a fanciful picture he’d seen in a book of mountains thrusting up through the steam of a young earth. A new century, all right, and this New York City looked like its cradle. His father’s words came back to him, not as he had uttered them two weeks ago, bitterly and coldly, but full of the excitement that had been in his voice last year, when he was showing newspaper and magazine articles about the World Wide Exposition in Paris to their Marlborough Street neighbor, Tom Willoughby. The future revealed, a future free from war because people would be too prosperous and enlightened to fight. They would get from one place to another on moving sidewalks, or by automobile, and speak across oceans by telephone; an electrified future when all the world would dance, as the Exposition’s visitors had, to a waltz of the lights. But Mr. Willoughby, a heathen when it came to progress, preferred his sidewalks stationary and the clop of horses’ hooves to the rattle of automobiles. He declined a chance to invest with Dad in a telephone company, because he thought the telephone was a novelty people would soon tire of. “After all, Cy, how many people would wish to speak to each other through a wire?” Dad had reported, mimicking and exaggerating the way Willoughby pronounced “wire” in his plummy Brahmin accent: why-ah. The penalty for his backwardness was to miss out on the profits reaped by a jump in the phone company’s stock, while his family paid by leading a life fast becoming as quaint as hoop skirts. They still communicated by note and messenger, and read by gaslight; the Braithwaites telephoned, and their house, electrified late last fall, blazed like a birthday cake at night.