Miss Lavinia was bewildered. Her downtown visits to her broker's office
were always made in a cab, with Lucy to stay in it as a preventative of
the driver's taking a sly glass or a thief snatching her lap-robe--she
never uses public carriage rugs. She clung to the obsolete idea that Wall
Street was no place for women, and saw, as in a dream, the daintily
dressed stenographers, bookkeepers, and confidential clerks mingling with
the trousered ranks in the street, not to mention the damsels in tidy
shirtwaists, with carefully undulated hair and pointed, polished finger
nails, who were lunching at near-by tables, sometimes seemingly with
their employers as well as with other male or female friends.

"I wonder how much of all this is bad for uptown home life?" Miss Lavinia
queried, gazing around the room; but as she did not address either of us
in particular, we did not answer, as we did not know,--who does?

A spare half-hour before closing time we gave to the Stock Exchange, and
it was quite enough, for some one was short on something, and pandemonium
reigned. As we stood on the corner of Rector Street and Broadway,
hesitating whether to take surface or elevated cars, faint strains of
organ music from Trinity attracted us.

"Service or choir practice; let us go in a few moments," said Evan, to
whom the organ is a voice that never fails to draw. We took seats far
back, and lost ourselves among the shadows. A special service was in
progress, the music half Gregorian, and the congregation was too
scattered to mar the feeling that we had slipped suddenly out of the
material world. The shadows of the sparrows outside flitted upward on the
stained glass windows, until it seemed as if the great chords had broken
free and taking form were trying to escape.