on Amsterdam Avenue, the shriek of a flat-wheeled surface car, the
sturdy pound of trucks, horns of automobiles; the separate sounds
scarcely distinguishable in a whirr which seemed visible as a thick,
gray-yellow dust-cloud.

Her mother went to lie down; the Sessionses (after an elaborate
explanation of why they did not keep a maid) began to get dinner, and
Una stole out to see New York by herself.

It all seemed different, at once more real and not so jumbled together,
now that she used her own eyes instead of the guidance of that knowing
old city bird, Mr. Albert Sessions.

Amsterdam Avenue was, even in the dusk of early autumn, disappointing in
its walls of yellow flat-buildings cluttered with fire-escapes, the
first stories all devoted to the same sort of shops over and over
again--delicatessens, laundries, barber-shops, saloons, groceries,
lunch-rooms. She ventured down a side-street, toward a furnace-glow of
sunset. West End Avenue was imposing to her in its solid brick and
graystone houses, and pavements milky in the waning light. Then came a
block of expensive apartments. She was finding the city of golden
rewards. Frivolous curtains hung at windows; in a huge apartment-house
hall she glimpsed a negro attendant in a green uniform with a monkey-cap
and close-set rows of brass buttons; she had a hint of palms--or what
looked like palms; of marble and mahogany and tiling, and a flash of
people in evening dress. In her plain, "sensible" suit Una tramped past.
She was unenvious, because she was going to have all these things soon.

Out of a rather stodgy vision of silk opera wraps and suitors who were
like floor-walkers, she came suddenly out on Riverside Drive and the
splendor of the city.

A dull city of straight-front unvaried streets is New York. But she
aspires in her sky-scrapers; she dreams a garden dream of Georgian days
in Gramercy Park; and on Riverside Drive she bares her exquisite breast
and wantons in beauty. Here she is sophisticated, yet eager, comparable
to Paris and Vienna; and here Una exulted.

Down a polished roadway that reflected every light rolled smart motors,
with gay people in the sort of clothes she had studied in
advertisements. The driveway was bordered with mist wreathing among the
shrubs. Above Una shouldered the tremendous facades of gold-corniced
apartment-houses. Across the imperial Hudson everything was enchanted by
the long, smoky afterglow, against which the silhouettes o