luxe greengrocer shops, the not-so-green beauty-parlors, and the
dyeing-and-cleaning, automobile-supplies, and confectionery establishments
of middle New York.

In a no-children-allowed, swimming-pool, electric-laundry, roof-garden,
dogs'-playground, cold-storage apartment most recently erected on a
block-square tract of upper Broadway, belonging to and named after the
youngest scion of an ancestor whose cow-patches had turned to kingdoms, the
fifteenth layer of this gigantic honeycomb overlooked from its seventeen
outside windows the great Babylonian valley of the city, the wide blade
of the river shining and curving slightly like an Arabian dagger, and the
embankment of New Jersey's Palisades piled against the sky with the effect
of angry horizon.

Nights, viewed from one of the seventeen windows, it was as if the river
flowed under a sullen sheath which undulated to its curves. On clear days
it threw off light like parrying steel in sunshine.

Were days when, gazing out toward it, Mrs. Ross, whose heart was like a
slow ache of ever-widening area, could almost feel its laving quality and,
after the passage of a tug- or pleasure-boat, the soothing folding of the
water down over and upon itself. Often, with the sun setting pink and whole
above the Palisades, the very copper glow which was struck off the water
would beat against her own west windows, and, as if smarting under the
brilliance, tears would come, sometimes staggering and staggering down,
long after the glow was cold. With such a sunset already waned, and the
valley of unrest fifteen stories below popping out into electric signs and
the red danger-lanterns of streets constantly in the remaking, Mrs. Harry
Ross, from the corner window of her seventeen, looked down on it from under
lids that were rimmed in red.

Beneath the swirl of a gown that lay in an iridescent avalanche of sequins
about her feet, her foot, tilted to an unbelievable hypothenuse off a
cloth-of-silver heel, beat a small and twinkling tattoo, her fingers
tattooing, too, along the chair-sides.

How insidiously do the years nibble in! how pussy-footed and how cocksure
the crow's-feet! One morning, and the first gray hair, which has been
turning from the cradle, arrives. Another, the mirror shows back a
sag beneath the eyes. That sag had come now to Mrs. Ross, giving her
eye-sockets a look of unconquerable weariness. The streak of quicksilver
had come, too, but more successfully combated. The