“Mrs. Livingstone?”
“Not at home,” said the man, gravely.
“Is—is Miss Holyoke in?”
“The ladies are out, sir,” said the man, decidedly.
“I will not leave a card,” said Arthur, answering the man’s gesture; and he walked sadly back to the club-house.
Surely, Arthur felt, the forms of life and the trammels of the great city were coming home to him.
CHAPTER VIII.
ARTHUR SEES MORE OF THE WORLD.
THE firm of Townley & Tamms were of the oldest and best-known bankers and brokers in the Street. Mr. Townley had been known in New York over fifty years; he had a taste for art, and was a director in the Allegheny Central Railroad. Tamms was a newer man; a younger man with a square head, stiff red beard, broad stubby fingers, and great business ability. Arthur was expected to be there a little after nine in the morning, which made it necessary for him to breakfast at the boarding-house on Fifth Avenue at sharp eight. Most of the other men did the same, except Townley, who had his coffee in his room.
These men were not interesting; in fact, they seemed to Arthur singularly unattractive. Their faces were all chopped or rough-hewn into one prevailing expression, as rows of trees by the sea-shore are bent the same way by the wind. It would be best described as a look of eagerness; their eyes were sharp and piercing, and they even ate their breakfast eagerly. They all seemed common to Arthur; and he one of them, reduced to his lowest terms of expression, a unit of population, nothing more. They were all hurrying through breakfast, folding their napkins, putting on their great-coats, and going down-town for money, and for nothing else; so was he. To be sure, he had a woman he loved at the end of it; but so, perhaps, had they.