"As long as you are repentant now, I won't crow. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. I'll hurry it up."
Like the hall, the room was high, cool and dim. The heavy, tapestried furniture seemed built for the ample Dutch forms that had no doubt once inhabited it. It was impossible to imagine raucous voices or useless rush between these lofty walls.
"It's the only real bit of Old New York left," Gregory said, and with one accord they moved to the wide window looking down on the Park.
The rumble of the Third Avenue El, two blocks away, threw into sharp relief the spirit of the past, the old, unhurried past that hangs over Gramercy Park. Behind the scratched and rusted palings, the dusty trees stood aloof, superior to the hustle and roar of the great tide washing its borders; faithful to dead standards, tolerant of the rented keys that now open the gates, to the ever-changing stream of tenants that flows in and out of the brownstone fronts, once the stately homes of unhurrying men.
"It is a bit of the past, isn't it?"
"Yes. It always makes me think of an old French marquise, stiff, powdered, poor, but never forgetting. Here, like this."
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and drew, with a few strokes, a marquise of the older days.
"But you see, she has to make some concessions, while she waits here, year after year, for the return of the Bourbons, and so——" Gregory clapped upon her head a hat, just a little bedraggled and over-trimmed. "The Spirit of the Present. She bought it at a bargain."
"Oh, Mary!"
"No. Don't, please." Gregory tore up the paper in such discomfort that Jean wanted to pat him on the shoulder and say: "There, there."