It
is an alien language: women with ample classical breasts ordering
their heavy stone limbs according to
Beaux Arts
rules; horns of plenty,
rams' heads, fasces, acanthus leaves, olive and myrtle, the symbols and
flora of another culture; groups of stone people striking attitudes over
the revolving doors of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce.
The men in snap-brim hats, the women swaying on high heels who enter
these classic portals pay no attention to the myrtle and the fasces. ,They
are not part of their lives. They are part of no life except the conserva-
tive, defensive, closed life of the buildings they ornament. These build-
ings are fortresses and the enemy is the life of the people.
DWIGHT MACDONALD
CROSS COUNTRY
43
Ninety-six desks, and on each a pile of newly printed matter, con-
tinually refreshed by the page boys. Senators with literary tastes must
find it hard to resist a dilletantish toying, to read a paragraph here, a
title page there, and then to pick up another neatly printed pamphlet
fresh from the press. The distraction offered by this constantly renewed
supply of reading matter, brought to one's desk as inevitably as the
seasons change-and with as little personal reaction on one's part-such
an ease of distraction must be debilitating. These pamphlets are State
papers, and it is no doubt a Senatorial duty to read them. But how diffi-
cult to accomplish any sustained thinking, to get anything really
done
with all these pleasant interruptions!
The Senators relax, the justices are ostentatiously moribund, but
they know their every movement is being watched, tensely, expectantly,
by boys in knickerbockers.
In
response to signals which are imperceptible
to the onlooker-a lifted finger, a flicker of the eyebrow-the boys dart
about like swallows. One doesn't like to think what it must do to the ego
of these judges and lawmakers-all
this frantic running about at their
slightest nod.
