ade March buy her the
Herald and the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions from
them. She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor and with faith to
believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully
represented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to their
needs. "Elegant, light, large, single and outside flats" were offered
with "all improvements--bath, ice-box, etc."--for twenty-five to thirty
dollars a month. The cheapness was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda,
the Jacinth, advertised them for forty dollars and sixty dollars, "with
steam heat and elevator," rent free till November. Others, attractive
from their air of conscientious scruple, announced "first-class flats;
good order; reasonable rents." The Helena asked the reader if she had
seen the "cabinet finish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings" of
its fifty-dollar flats; the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments,
with "six light rooms and bath, porcelain wash-tubs, electric bells, and
hall-boy," as it offered for seventy-five dollars were unapproached
by competition. There was a sameness in the jargon which tended to
confusion. Mrs. March got several flats on her list which promised
neither steam heat nor elevators; she forgot herself so far as to
include two or three as remote from the down-town region of her choice
as Harlem. But after she had rejected these the nondescript vertebrate
was still voluminous enough to sustain her buoyant hopes.

The waiter, who remembered them from year to year, had put them at a
window giving a pretty good section of Broadway, and before they set
out on their search they had a moment of reminiscence. They recalled the
Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago, swelling and roaring with
a tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the
horsecars have now banished from it. The grind of their wheels and
the clash of their harsh bells imperfectly fill the silence that the
omnibuses have left, and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective of
former times.

They went out and stood for a moment before Grace Church, and looked
down the stately thoroughfare, and found it no longer impressive, no
longer characteristic. It is still Broadway in name, but now it is like
any other street. You do not now take your life in your hand when you
attempt to cross it; the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of
timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm a