r out, shutting the door upon her.

IV.

Everybody had gone out on Christmas eve--darting about in sleighs; at
service in the churches; at a party given in their set; shopping, as if
their lives depended on it. Buying, selling, visiting, looking, the city
was all astir. In the churches, soberly gay with evergreen trimming,
like a young widow very stylish in black, but very proper withal, people
were listening to the anthems, and everything about the place was wide
awake, unless it was the chimes taking a nap until twelve o'clock;
drygoods men ran to and fro, dropping smiles, and winding themselves up
in a great medley reel of silks, laces, and things of _virtu_ in
general; next door, the booksellers were resplendent in dazzling
bindings, pictures and photographs of everything and everybody, all of
which were at everybody's disposal--take 'em all home, if you pleased;
livery stables were as bare as if there had been an invasion of the
country that day, and smiling keepers touched their pockets, and shook
their heads pityingly at late comers; and even in the markets jolly
butchers laughed, and sawed, and cut, and counted their money--and those
leathery fellows that were never jolly, suddenly found out a new
commercial maxim, that jollity is the best policy, and they fell to
laughing too. 'Christmas is coming!' thought everybody. 'Christmas is
coming!' and some of the lively small bells in the towers, not grown yet
to years of ripe discretion, whispered to each other, and had to bite
their tongues to keep from shouting it right out.

The dance house and the narrow alley left behind, Jane was in the street
too; she went with the crowd, pulling her hood so as to hide her face.
She glanced at the costly goods that lay in confusion on the counters of
the stores, and smiled bitterly, taking hold of her own cheap dress; the
sleighs almost ran over her, they shot back and forth so wildly, to her
whirling brain; a German air that a band was playing on a serenade
somewhere in the distance seemed to roar in her ears like thunder. She
stopped before a confectioner's. The hot smell of meats came up through
the grating where she stood; the window was ablaze with gas, piled high
with pyramids of glittering frost, which rose out of a heaped profusion
of carved lobster and turkey, and fruits and candies; she saw girls with
pretty faces and nice dresses waiting on the fashionable crowd inside,
and said to herself that she ought to be t