It was the first time in five years that he had been East, and a good deal more than five years since he had been to the District of Columbia. In all the time since the end of the war, the only travelling he and Myra had done consisted of their inexpensive summer vacations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and on those occasions the children had been with them. Every penny they could save had gone into the endlessly discussed plans for a summer in Europe as soon as Brian was old enough to travel—this coming summer might have been it—and endless dreams of the places they would go where they had never been, the things they would see, the satisfaction of that strange hunger of almost every American to see where his people had come from and what they had left behind them. But the truth of the matter was that Silas had not, since the war ended, spent one night away from Myra or the children, and here he was on a wild adventure almost a thousand miles away from them, coming into the airport and listening with half an ear to Ike Amsterdam’s caustic comments on flight.
