a handsome thing in the clerk of the weather, considering Mrs. Walraven
had not given a ball for twenty years before, to have burnished up the
sun, and brushed away the clouds, and shut up that icy army of winter
winds, and turned out as neat an article of weather as it is possible
in the nature of November to turn out.

Of course, Mrs. Walraven dwelt on New York's stateliest avenue, in a big
brown-stone palace that was like a palace in an Eastern story, with its
velvet carpets, its arabesques, its filigree work, its chairs, and
tables, and sofas touched up and inlaid with gold, and cushioned in
silks of gorgeous dyes.

And in all Fifth Avenue, and in all New York City, there were not half
a dozen old women of sixty half so rich, half so arrogant, or half so
ill-tempered as Mrs. Ferdinand Walraven.

On this bad November afternoon, while the rain and sleet lashed the
lofty windows, and the shrill winds whistled around the gables, Mrs.
Ferdinand Walraven's only son sat in his chamber, staring out of the
window, and smoking no end of cigars.

Fifth Avenue, in the raw and rainy twilight, is not the sprightliest
spot on earth, and there was very little for Mr. Walraven to gaze at
except the stages rattling up the pave, and some belated newsboys crying
their wares.

Perhaps these same little ill-clad newsboys, looking up through the
slanting rain, and seeing the well-dressed gentleman behind the rich
draperies, thought it must be a fine thing to be Mr. Carl Walraven, heir
to a half a million of money and the handsomest house in New York.