the three big football games and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth
Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed
excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony's mail.
Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their
fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three
dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were
proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous
undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were of
course invited to each of the ninety-six parties--as were the young
lady's group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager
young outsiders. To continue, there was a third layer from the skirts of
the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut
and the ineligible sections of Long Island--and doubtless contiguous
layers down to the city's shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society
of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking
forward to a rising young broker or jeweller and a kosher wedding; Irish
girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a
society of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up
choirboys.

And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entre--the working
girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing
finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular
excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted
male--as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may
consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and
the subway's foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new
plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came
out with new dances. And the railroads came out with new schedules
containing new mistakes instead of the old ones that the commuters had