Paris, London, Berlin

The time was 1938, and so it might have been one hundred years ago— those pale, remote figures under the blackened trees. Cold winds stirred across the birch tops and down the meadows of the old, purple earth of Poland; and the last leaves dropped. It was in the aging Baltic country just before the War, at the north join of the German and the Pole on the historic black waters—in Danzig, a winter land of sticks and hunger, spiked with feudal lords whose hearts were overlaid with the thin elegances of Paris, London, and Berlin, but which still ached with the antique hates and griefs of the cold countries, in literature always called “Mother . . .”