She is right—and you know that she is right. You can have a glorious ride up the street, that even in its days of social decadence is still the finest highway in the land—a ride that continues across the town and up its parked rim for long miles—for a mere ten cents of Uncle Sam's currency and as for the reverse—well you are going to dinner in a smart hotel with Katherine in a little while.
You swing across Broadway and up the west edge of Madison square, catch a single, wondering close-at-hand glimpse of the white campanile of the Metropolitan tower which dominates that open place and so all but replaces Diana on her perch above Madison Square Garden—a landmark of the New York of a quarter of a century ago and which is apt to come into the hands of the wreckers almost any day now. Now you are at the south edge of the new shopping district, although some of the ultra places below Thirty-fourth street have begun to move into that portion of the avenue just south of Central Park. In a little while they may be stealing up the loveliest portion of the avenue—from Fifty-ninth street north.
The great shops dominate the avenue. And if you look with sharp eyes as the green bus bears you up this via sacre, you may see that one of the greatest ones—a huge department store encased in architecturally superb white marble—bears no sign or token of its ownership or trade. An oversight, you think. Not a bit of it. Four blocks farther up the avenue is another great store in white marble—a jewelry shop of international reputation. You will have to scan its broad façade closely indeed before you find the name of the firm in tiny letters upon the face of its clock. Oversight? Not a bit of it. It is the ultra of shop-keeping in New York—the assumption that the shop is so well known that it need not be placarded to the vulgar world. And if strangers from other points fail to identify it—well that is because of their lack of knowledge and the shopkeeper may secretly rejoice.
But, after all, it is the little shops that mark the character of Fifth avenue—not its great emporiums. It is the little millinery shops where an engaging creature in black and white simpers toward you and calls you, if you are of the eternal feminine, "my dear;" the jewelry shops where the lapidary rises from his lathe and offers a bit of craftsmanship; the rare galleries that run from old masters to modern etchers; specialty shops, filled top to bottom with toys or Persian rugs, or women's sweaters, or foreign magazines and books, that render to Fifth avenue its tremendous cosmopolitanism. These little shops make for personality. There is something in the personal contact between the proprietor and the customer that makes mere barter possess a real fascination. And if you do pay two or three times the real value in the little shop you have just so much more fun out of the shopping. And there are times when real treasures may come out of their stores.
"Look at the cornices," interrupts Katherine. "Mr. Arnold Bennett says that they are the most wonderful things in all New York."
Katherine may strain her neck, looking at cornices if she so wills. As for you, the folk who promenade the broad sidewalks are more worth your while. There are more of them upon the west walk than upon the east—for some strange reason that has long since brought about a similar phenomenon upon Broadway and sent west side rents high above those upon the east. Fifth avenue thrusts its cosmopolitanism upon you, not alone in her shops, with their wonderfully varied offerings, but in the very humans who tread her pavements. The New York girl may not always be beautiful but she is rarely anything but impeccable. And if in the one instance she is extreme in her styles, in the next she is apt to be severe in her simplicity of dress. And it is difficult to tell to which ordinary preference should go. These girls—girls in a broad sense all the way from trim children in charge of maid or governess to girls whose pinkness of skin defies the graying of their locks—a sprinkling of men, not always so faultless in dress or manner as their sisters—and you have the Fifth avenue crowd. Then between these two quick moving files of pedestrians—set at all times in the rapid tempo of New York—a quadruple file of carriages; the greater part of them motor driven.
Traffic in Fifth avenue, like traffic almost everywhere else in New York is a problem increasing in perplexity. A little while ago the situation was met and for a time improved by slicing off the fronts of the buildings—perhaps the most expensive shave that the town has ever known—and setting back the sidewalks six or eight feet. But the benefits then gained have already been over-reached and the traffic policeman at the street corners all the way up the avenue must possess rare wit and diplomacy—while their fellows at such corners as Thirty-fourth and Forty-second are hardly less than field generals. And with all the finesse of their work the traffic moves like molasses. Long double and triple files of touring cars and limousines, the combined cost of which would render statistics such as would gladden the heart of a Sunday editor, make their way up and down the great street tediously. If a man is in a hurry he has no business even to essay the Avenue. And occasionally the whole tangle is double-tangled. The shriek of a fire-engine up a side street or the clang of an ambulance demanding a clear right-of-way makes the traffic question no easier. Yet the policemen at the street corners are not caught unawares. With the shrill commands of their own whistles they maneuver trucks and automobiles and even some old-fashioned hansom cabs, pedestrians, all the rest—as coolly and as evenly as if it had been rehearsed for whole weeks.
*****
New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show street—for Fifth avenue can now be fairly said to have usurped Broadway as the main highway of the upper city—tremendous. You begin to compute what must be the rental values upon this proud section of Fifth avenue, as it climbs Murray Hill from Thirty-fourth street to Forty-second street, when Katherine interrupts you once again. She knows her New York thoroughly indeed.
"Do you notice that house?" she demands.