Page:Tales of Three Cities (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1884).djvu/17

Rh is right. In matters of duty, in short, she is a real little artist; and her masterpiece (in that way) is coming back here to live. She can't like it; her tastes are not here. If she did like it, I am sure she would never have invented such a phrase as the one of which she delivered herself the other day,—"I think one's life has more dignity in one's own country." That 's a phrase made up after the fact. No one ever gave up living in Europe because there is a want of dignity in it. Poor Eunice talks of "one's own country" as if she kept the United States in the back-parlor. I have yet to perceive the dignity of living in Fifty-third Street. This, I suppose, is very treasonable; but a woman is n't obliged to be patriotic. I believe I should be a good patriot if I could sketch my native town. But I can't make a picture of the brown-stone stoops in the Fifth Avenue, or the platform of the elevated railway in the Sixth. Eunice has suggested to me that I might find some subjects in the Park, and I have been there to look for them. But somehow the blistered sentiers of asphalt, the rock-work caverns, the huge iron bridges spanning little muddy lakes, the whole crowded, cockneyfied place, making up so many faces to look pretty, don't appeal to me—have n't, from beginning to end, a discoverable "bit." Besides, it 's too cold to sit on a campstool under this clean-swept sky, whose depths of blue air do very well, doubtless, for the floor of heaven, but are quite too far away for the ceiling of earth. The sky over here seems part of