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 Tenderloin, and its Rialto made so
brilliant at night by thousands of elaborate electric signs, New
York still had the subdued air of a provincial town, compared with
the exuberant gaiety, the multiple attractions, the beauties,
natural and artificial, of cosmopolitan Paris.

The boulevards were crowded, as usual at that hour, and the crush
of both vehicles and pedestrians was so great as to permit of only
a snail-like progress. The clumsy three-horse omnibuses--
Madeleine-Bastille--crowded inside and out with passengers and
with their neatly uniformed drivers and conductors, so different
in appearance and manner from our own slovenly street-car rowdies,