Roger and Helen went into New York with the travellers and Delia and Margaret were on the pier to see the steamer leave.

It was a glorious afternoon and the boat slipped around the end of the Battery while the westering sun was still shining brilliantly on the water, touching it with sparkles on the tip of each tiny wave.  The Statue of Liberty, with the sun behind it, towered darkly against the gold.  The huge buildings of the lower city stretched skywards, the new Equitable, the latest addition to the mammoth group, shutting off almost entirely the view of the Singer Tower from the harbor, just as the Woolworth Tower hides it from observers on the north.

Between them Grandfather and Grandmother Emerson were able to point out nearly all of the sights of the East River—­several parks and playgrounds, Bellevue Hospital, the Vanderbilt model tenements for people threatened with tuberculosis, the Junior League Hotel for self-supporting women, the old dwelling where Dorothy’s friend, the “box furniture lady,” had established a school to teach the folk of the neighborhood how to use tools for the advantage of their house-furnishings.

The boat was one of those which steams around Cape Cod instead of stopping at Fall River, Rhode Island, and sending its passengers to Boston by train.  Early morning found them all on deck watching the waters of Massachusetts Bay and trying to place on a map that Mr. Emerson produced from his pocket the towns whose church spires they could see pointing skyward far off on their left.  Twin lighthouses they decided, marked Gurnet Point, the entrance to Plymouth Bay, and they strained their eyes to see the town that was the oldest settlement in Massachusetts, and imagined they were watching the bulky little Mayflower making her way landward between the headlands.

Mr. Emerson convoyed his party to a hotel on Copley Square and left them there while he went out at once to meet his business friends.

“How far away Rosemont seems, and poor Mrs. Paterno with her troubles,” she said an hour later as they stood before Sargent’s panel of the Prophets in the Public Library.

CHAPTER X

TROLLEYING

As for the Art Museum, they wandered delightedly from one room to another, but went away with a sensation of having seen too much that was almost as uncomfortable as that of having eaten too much.

“I should like to come here or to go to the Metropolitan in New York with some one who could tell me about every picture or every object in just one room and stay there for an hour and then go away and think about it,” said Ethel Blue.

“We will do that some day at the Metropolitan,” said Mrs. Emerson.  “If the Club would like to go in a body some day we can get one of the guides who do just what you describe.  We can tell her the sort of thing we want to see—­classical statuary or English artists or the Morgan collection—­and have it all shown to us from the standpoint of the expert critic.  Or we can put ourselves in the hands of the guide and say that we’d like to see the ten exhibits that the Museum looks upon as the choicest.”