and enjoys life while he is able to. These Frenchmen, and indeed
all the Continental nations, had solved the problem. The gaiety of
their cities, and this exuberant joy of life they communicated to
all about them, were sufficient proofs of it.

Fascinated by the gay scene around him Jefferson laid the newspaper
aside. To the young American, fresh from prosaic money-mad New
York, the City of Pleasure presented indeed a novel and beautiful
spectacle. How different, he mused, from his own city with its one
fashionable thoroughfare--Fifth Avenue--monotonously lined for miles
with hideous brownstone residences, and showing little real animation
except during the Saturday afternoon parade when the activities of
the smart set, male and female, centred chiefly in such exciting
diversions as going to Huyler's for soda, taking tea at the Waldorf,
and trying to outdo each other in dress and show. New York
certainly was a dull place with all its boasted cosmopolitanism.
There was no denying that. Destitute of any natural beauty,
handicapped by its cramped geographical position between two rivers,
made unsightly by gigantic sky-scrapers and that noisy monstrosity
the Elevated Railroad, having no intellectual interests, no art
interests, no interest in anything not immediately connected with
dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a
city to _live_ in. The millionaires were building white-marble
palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native
architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness
and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to
invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in
spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls--and Jefferson
insisted that in this one important particular New York had no
peer--in spite of its comfortable theatres and its wicked