IV
Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in the afternoon. The diastole of travelers had spread all morning from Grand Central; the systole is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in the afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the suburbs, tearing their way through the weaker streams that are drawn up by the neighboring shops and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and Sherry’s and Delmonico’s and the Manhattan and the Belmont are no longer columnar monuments, holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human floods which they suck in and spray out. The street itself is lost to memory and vision. A swollen stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless bosom the freight of curiosity and pride and favor. One might fancy, to gaze on this mad throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered the universe, worshipers of a machine.
It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles, the feminine hour. A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and leisure. Many of the white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are not white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend the world is gay.
They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides.