But the most popular and populous time of all is the regular walking-home hour, not only for those who have spent the day down toward the end of the island at work, but for those who have no more serious business to look after than wandering from club to club drinking cocktails, or from house to house drinking tea.
All who take the walk regularly meet many of the same ones every day, not only acquaintances, but others whom we somehow never see in any other place, but learn to know quite well, and we wonder who they are—and they wonder who we are, I suppose. Pairs of pink-faced old gentlemen, walking arm-in-arm and talking vigorously. Contented young couples who look at the old furniture in the antique-shop windows and who are evidently married, and other younger couples who evidently soon will be, and see nothing, not even their friends. Intent-browed young business men with newspapers under their arms; governesses out with their charges; bevies of fluffy girls with woodcock eyes, especially on matinée day with programmes in their hands, talking gushingly.
At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria.
It is a sort of a club, this walking-up-the-avenue crowd; and each member grows to expect certain other members at particular points in the walk, and is rather disappointed when, for instance, the old gentleman with the large nose is not with his daughter this evening. "What can be the matter?" the rest of us ask each other, seeing her alone.
There is one man, the disagreeable member of the club, a bull-frog-looking man of middle age with a Germanic face and beard, a long stride, and a tightly buttoned walking-coat (I'm sure he's proud of his chest), who comes down when we are on the way up and gets very indignant every time we happen to be late. His scowl says, as plainly as this type, "What are you doing way down here by the Reform Club? You know you ought to be passing the Cathedral by this time!" And the worst of it is, we always do feel ashamed, and I'm afraid he sees it.
... with baby-carriages.
*****
This mile and a half from where Flora McFlimsey lived to the beginning of the driving in the Park is not the staid, sombre, provincial old Fifth Avenue which Flora McFlimsey knew. Up Fifth Avenue to the Park New York is a world-city.