ed and
even a little loggy with too many satisfactions.

But that is the New York of the Saturnite and of Teufelsdroeckh alone with
his stars.

Upon Mrs. Blutch Connors, gazing out upon the tide of West Forty-seventh
Street, life lay lightly and as unrelated as if ravage and carnage and the
smell of still warm blood were of another planet.

A shower of white light from an incandescent tooth-brush sign opposite
threw a pallid reflection upon Mrs. Connors; it spun the fuzz of frizz
rising off her blond coiffure into a sort of golden fog and picked out the
sequins of her bodice.

The dinner-hour descends glitteringly upon West Forty-seventh Street, its
solid rows of long, lanky hotels, actors' clubs, and sixty-cent _tables
d'hote_ adding each its candle-power.

From her brace of windows in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not
unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great
sea of Broadway. A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through
the snarl of traffic, bleating. A woman, wrapped in a greatcoat of "baby"
pelts and an almost undistinguishable dog in the cove of her arm, walked
out from the Hotel Metropolis across the sidewalk and into a taxicab. An
army of derby hats, lowered slightly into the wind, moved through the white
kind of darkness. Standing there, buffeting her pink nails across her pink
palms, Mrs. Connors followed the westward trend of that army. Out from it,
a face lying suddenly back flashed up at her, a mere petal riding a swift
current. But at sight of it Mrs. Blutch Connors inclined her entire body,
pressing a smile and a hand against the cold pane, then turned inward,
flashing on an electrolier--a bronze Nydia holding out a cluster of frosted
bulbs. A great deal of the strong breath of a popular perfume and a great
deal of artificial heat lay sweet upon that room, as if many flowers had
lived and died in the same air, leaving insidious but slightly stale
memories.

The hotel suite has become the brocaded tomb of the old-fashioned garden.
The kitchen has shrunk into the chafing-dish, and all the dear old
concoctions that mother used to try to make now come tinned, condensed,
and predigested in sixty-seven varieties. Even the vine-covered threshold
survives only in the booklets of promoters of suburban real estate. In
New York, the home-coming spouse arrives on the vertical, shunted out
at whatever his layer. Yet, when Mrs. Connors opened the door of her