At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an
infatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the
world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say
that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now said
that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that
the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third floor
interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a
domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect
of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it was
better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those people
through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of
the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying
her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a
table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. What
suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest! At the Forty-second
Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track
to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long
stretch of the Elevated to north and south. The track that found and lost
itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable
lights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points
and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and
churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble
in them, and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with
vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable
perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which
in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and
they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street on
which they ran to the depot; but for the present they were mostly
inarticulate before it. They had another moment of rich silence when they