CHAPTER XX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY—CONTINUED
I
OF course I resented all the changes and, equally of course, it was unreasonable that I should. I had not stood stock still for a quarter of a century, why should I expect Philadelphia to?
And little by little, as I got my breath again after my first indignant surprise, as I pulled myself together after my first series of shocks, I began to understand that the wonder was that anything should be left, and to see that Philadelphia has held on to enough of its character and beauty to impress the stranger, anyway, with the fine serenity that I missed at every turn. Philadelphia does not "bristle," Henry James wrote of it a very few years ago, by which he meant that it does not change, is incapable of changing, though to me it was, in this sense, so "bristling" that I tingled all over with the pricks. But, then, I knew what Philadelphia had been. That was why I was impressed first with the things that had changed, why, also, my pleasure was the keener in my later discovery of the things that had not.
I can laugh now at myself for my joy in all sorts of dear, absurd trifles simply because of their homely proof that the new Philadelphia had saved some relics of the old. What they stood for in my eyes gave value to the little
