Janet dressed with promptness and pleasure. She appeared to have forgotten that Robert Lloyd had particularly said that he was coming about noon in order to take her home. Her friend did not remind her. The knowledge that Robert would go away in bitter disappointment robbed the outing of none of its zest, so far as Cornelia was concerned.
Claude, too, had promised to drop in at Number Fifteen. This promise Janet bore well in mind. But as his visit was not to take place until late in the afternoon and there was thus no danger of missing him, she joined Cornelia with enthusiasm.
II
At the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, where Kips Bay edges its dingy little proletarian stores into bourgeois respectability, the two young women entered a car bound for the West Twenty-third Street ferry. It proceeded at a jog trot along Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street where it struck the cross-town line west.
Janet felt no annoyance at the snail's pace from which the car never departed. Manhattan was still a novelty to her, and this section of the East Side was wholly new.
But Cornelia made unflattering comparison between the surface conveyances in Manhattan and the bus transportation which Londoners and Parisians enjoyed. She was annoyed by the complacency that New Yorkers displayed toward their street-car service and the petty provincialism that actually led them to believe this service to be the fastest in the world, when in fact it was the slowest. At the climax of her irritation she gave Janet the benefit of one of Robert Lloyd's epigrams. Robert had once said that New York "rapid transit," as it was optimistically called, was the organized effort of the local traction magnates to annihilate the specific advantages of modern electrical machinery. Cornelia did not doubt that in this effort they had triumphed.
The jolts with which the car came to a standstill at each successive street crossing, and the jerks with which it resumed its languid pace again, would ordinarily have frazzled her nerves for the day. This time, however, she bore the ordeal much more composedly. For one thing, Janet's calm spirit had a soothing influence upon her. For another, it amused her mightily to have so unsophisticated a companion to point out the sights to. She caused Janet to observe the Italian district with its macaroni dens along the cross streets, the Armenian district with the Eastern restaurants parading strange Greek-lettered names, and Kips Bay's fashionable western fringe with its Madison Avenue hotels, stores and residential palaces.
Janet drank it all in thirstily. Not for a moment did she regret the defiance she had flung at her mother's wishes by going to the Outlaws' Ball. On the contrary, this act of insurgency appeared to have heightened her perception as much as it had strengthened her self-esteem. She saw things with different eyes, or believed she did. The people and the shops fairly brandished a life and reality totally new to her experience. She longed to be more than a mere spectator in the tumultuous scene unfolded before her. She would have given anything to be even a cog—an active cog—in this giant metropolis whose roar and grime possessed an immense attraction.
At the North River they left the car. Three big ferry houses confronted them and Cornelia was undecided which to take. It was a grave question in her mind, for she staged the big scenes of her life with as much care as a play producer. The artist in her at once eliminated the Erie ferry.
"The Erie boats are too dinky," she said. "Shall we take the Jersey Central or the Lackawanna?"