New Year's Day (The 'Seventies)

OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN ( The ’Forties ) By EDITH WHARTON
BY EDITH WHARTON AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC. DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1923, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation ( The Red Book Magazine ) PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



“SHE was bad ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing. Her spectacles slanted on her knitting, she dropped the words in a hiss that might have singed the snowy baby-blanket which engaged her indefatigable fingers. (It was typical of my mother to be always employed in benevolent actions while she uttered uncharitable words.)
“ They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel ”; how the precision of the phrase characterized my old New York! A generation later, people would have said, in reporting an affair such as Lizzie Hazeldean’s with Henry Prest: “They met in hotels”—and today who but a few superannuated spinsters, still feeding on the venom secreted in their youth, would take any interest in the tracing of such topographies?
Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given point in a sentimental relation; as old Sillerton Jackson, in response to my mother, grumbled through his perfect “china set”: “Fifth Avenue Hotel? They might meet in the middle of Fifth Avenue nowadays, for all that anybody cares.”
But what a flood of light my mother’s tart phrase had suddenly focussed on an unremarked incident of my boyhood!
The Fifth Avenue Hotel ... Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest ... the conjunction of these names had arrested her darting talk on a single point of my memory, as a search-light, suddenly checked in its gyrations, is held motionless while one notes each of the unnaturally sharp and lustrous images it picks out.