Our Children's Children

16

Alice Gale stood in the window, gazing across Pennsylvania Avenue to the gathering crowd in the park beyond it. She hugged herself in shivering ecstasy, not daring to believe that she actually was there, that she could be back in twentieth century Washington, where history had been made, where legendary men had lived, and at this moment in the very room where crowned heads had slept.

Crowned heads, she thought. What an awful, almost medieval phrase. And yet it had a certain ring to it, a certain elegance that her world had never known.

She had caught a glimpse of the Washington Monument as she and her father had been driven into the White House grounds, and out there, just beyond it, a marble Lincoln sat in his marble chair, with his arms resting on its arms and his massive, whiskered face bearing that look of greatness, of sorrow and compassion that had quieted thousands into reverent silence as they came climbing up the stairs to stand face to face with him.

Just across the hallway her father was in the Lincoln bedroom, with its massive Victorian bed and the velvet-covered slipper chairs. Although, she recalled, Lincoln had never really slept there.

It was history back to life, she thought, history resurrected. And it was a precious thing. It would be something to remember always, no matter what might be ahead. It would be something to remember back in the Miocene. And what, she wondered with a little shiver, might the Miocene be like? If they ever got there, if the people of this time should decide to help them in getting there?

But whatever might happen, she had something she could say — "Once I slept in the Queen's Bedroom."

She turned from the window and looked in wonder once-again-renewed at the huge four-poster bed with its hangings and counterpane of rose and white, at the mahogany bookcase-secretary that stood between the windows, the soft white carpeting.

It was selfish of her, she knew, to be feeling this when so many others of her world at this very moment stood homeless and bewildered, unsure of their welcome, perhaps wondering if they would be fed and where they might lay their heads this night, but even as she tried, she could not rebuke herself.