!" sighed Cordelia. "How terrible cunning you men are,
to get up such a story to make all the girls think you're romantic!"

But, oh, how happy Cordelia was! At last she had met her prince--the
future Mayor--her Sultan of the gilded halls. In that humid, sticky,
midsummer heat among the tenements, every other woman dragged along as
if she weighed a thousand pounds, but Cordelia felt like a feather
floating among clouds.

The babel--did the reader ever walk up Forsyth Street on a hot night,
into Second Avenue, and across to Avenue A, and up to Tompkins Park?
The noise of the tens of thousands on the pavements makes a babel that
drowns the racket of the carts and cars. The talking of so many persons,
the squalling of so many babies, the mothers scolding and slapping every
third child, the yelling of the children at play, the shouts and loud
repartee of the men and women--all these noises rolled together in the
air makes a steady hum and roar that not even the breakers on a hard
sea-beach can equal. You might say that the tenements were empty, as
only the very sick, who could not move, were in them. For miles and
miles they were bare of humanity, each flat unguarded and unlocked, with
the women on the sidewalks, with the youngest children in arms or in
perambulators, while those of the next sizes romped in the streets; with
the girls and boys of fourteen giggling in groups in the doorways (the
age and places where sex first asserts itself), and only the young men
and women missing; for they were in the parks, on the wharves, and on
the roofs, all frolicking and love-making.

And every house front was like a Russian stove, expending the heat it
had sucked from the all-day sun. And every door and window breathed bad
air--air without oxygen, rich and rank and stifling.

But Cordelia was Clarice, the future Mayoress. She did not know she was
picking a tiresome way around the boys at leap-frog, and the mothers and
babies and baby-carriages. She did not notice the smells, or feel the
bumps she got from those who ran against her. She thought she was in the
blue drawing-room at Newport, where a famous Hungarian count was
trilling the soft prelude to a _csardas_ on the piano, and Mr.
Stuyvesant had just introduced her to the future Mayor, who was
spellbound by her charms, and was by her side, a captive. She reached
out her hand, and it touched Mr. Fletcher's arm (just as a ragamuffin
propelled himself head first against her), an