h the words from the
lips were honeyed.

"It is very good of you to drop in in this way, Mr. Burnett," she said,
as she gave him her hand. "It is very quiet down here."

"It is to me the pleasantest part of the city."

"You think so now. I thought so once," and there was a note of sadness
in her voice. "But it isn't New York. It is a place for the people who
are left."

"But it has associations."

"Yes, I know. We pretend that it is more aristocratic. That means the
rents are lower. It is a place for youth to begin and for age to end.
We seem to go round in a circle. Mr. Mavick began in the service of the
government, now he has entered it again--ah, you did not know?--a place
in the Custom-House. He says it is easier to collect other people's
revenues than your own. Do you know, Mr. Burnett, I do not see much
use in collecting revenues anyway--so far as New York is concerned the
people get little good of them. Look out there at that cloud of dust in
the street."

Mrs. Mavick rambled on in the whimsical, cynical fashion of old ladies
when they cease to have any active responsibility in life and become
spectators of it. Their remaining enjoyment is the indulgence of frank
speech.

"But I thought," Philip interrupted, "that this part of the town was
specially New York."

"New York!" cried Carmen, with animation. "The New York of the
newspapers, of the country imagination; the New York as it is known in
Paris is in Wall Street and in the palaces up-town. Who are the kings of
Wall Street, and who build the palaces up-town? They say that there are
no Athenians in Athens, and no Romans in Rome. How many New-Yorkers
are there in New York? Do New-Yorkers control the capital, rule
the politics, build the palaces, direct the newspapers, furnish the
entertainment, manufacture the literature, set the pace in society? Even
the socialists and mobocrats are not native. Successive invaders, as in
Rome, overrun and occupy the town.

"No, Mr. Burnett, I have left the existing New York. How queer it is
to think about it. My first husband was from New Hampshire. My second
husband was from Illinois. And there is your Murad Ault. The Lord knows
where he came from.

"Talk about the barbarians occupying Rome! Look at that Ault in a
palace! Who was that emperor--Caligula?--I am like the young lady from
a finishing-school who said she never could remember which came first in
history, Greece or Rome--who stabled his horses with stall