Oh! what a little witch this girl was—dirty, light-topped, French-heeled shoes, wiggly, frayed skirt edge, silly walk—she kept lopping over against her partner, a lad who was parading the damp streets in thin-soled, shoddy shoes about as substantial as paper. I couldn’t stand their idiotic talk. I left them, paddled up to Forty-second Street, and ran across it to Broadway.
I noted that many more electric lights have been put up since I was here last. The Great White Way has more than a thousand eyes now, and the pavements were rather lighter than I liked them.
I lifted my paws daintily, feeling as if I were walking on mirrors. However, the mirrors were mostly obscured—what crowds of hurrying, restless human beings surging to and fro, meeting, clashing, avoiding, closing, opening—just like waves of the sea.
I had no need to keep out of sight of the policemen here. They were fully occupied with the human waves which sometimes leaped over and by them, in spite of the warning hand that would keep them from being dashed to pieces by the street traffic.
I paused to take breath round the corner of a street.
“Say, those policemen have a hard time,” I remarked to a black cat who had come out to take the air, and was blotted against a dark spot in a wall. She wasn’t a bit afraid of me.
“Everybody has a hard time in New York,” she said gloomily, “and if one human goes under the wheels, the rest show their teeth at the cop.”
“That’s mean,” I observed.
“Everything’s mean here,” she said. “It’s a hideous place for cats.”