andy. I had a keen feeling
for the sociability of the crowd. All plebeian Chelsea was abroad, and
a bourgeois population is nowhere unneighborly. Women shapeless with
bundles, their hats awry over thin, eager faces, gathered in knots on
the edge of the curb, boasting of their bargains. Little girls in
curlpapers and little boys in brimless hats clung to their skirts,
whining for pennies, only to be silenced by absent-minded cuffs. A few
disconsolate fathers strayed behind these family groups, the rest
being distributed between the barber shops and the corner lamp-posts.
I understood these people, being one of them, and I liked them, and I
found it all delightfully sociable.

Saturday night is the workman's wife's night, but that does not
entirely prevent my lady from going abroad, if only to leave an order
at the florist's. So it happened that Bellingham Hill and Washington
Avenue, the aristocratic sections of Chelsea, mingled with Arlington
Street on Broadway, to the further enhancement of my enjoyment of the
occasion. For I always loved a mixed crowd. I loved the contrasts, the
high lights and deep shadows, and the gradations that connect the two,
and make all life one. I saw many, many things that I was not aware of
seeing at the time. I only found out afterwards what treasures my
brain had stored up, when, coming to the puzzling places in life,
light and meaning would suddenly burst on me, the hidden fruit of some
experience that had not impressed me at the time.

How many times, I wonder, did I brush past my destiny on Broadway,
foolishly staring after it, instead of going home to pray? I wonder
did a stranger collide with me, and put me patiently out of his way,
wondering why such a mite was not at home and abed at ten o'clock in
the evening, and never dreaming that one day he might have to reckon
with me? Did some one smile down on my childish glee, I wonder,
unwarned of a day when we should weep together? I wonder--I wonder. A
million threads of life and love and sorrow was the common street; and
whether we would or not, we entangled ourselves in a common maze,
without paying the homage of a second glance to those who would some
day master us; too dull to pick that face from out the crowd which one
day would bend over us in love or pity or remorse. What company of
skipping, laughing little girls is to be reproached for careless
hours, when men and women on every side stepped heedlessly into the
traps of fate?