One would like to know whether, in the breasts of such as these, familiar environment exerts any remarkable influence. If so, it could have been in but one direction. For that part of town was one vast nursery. Everywhere, on every side, were the swarming babies—a baby for every flag-stone in the pavements. Babies and babies, and little besides babies, except larger children and the mothers. Perambulators with two, even three, baby passengers; mothers with as many as five children trailing after them; babies in broad baggy laps, babies at the breast, babies creeping, toppling, screaming, overflowing into the gutters. Such was the unbroken scene from the Big Barracks to Tompkins Square; ay, to Harlem and to the East River, and almost to Broadway. In the park, as if the street scenes had been merely preliminary, the paths were alive, wriggling, with babies of every age, from the new-born to the children in pigtails and knickerbockers—and, lo! these were already paired and practising at courtship. The walk that Cordelia was taking was amid a fever, a delirium, of maternity—a rhapsody, a baby's opera, if one considered its noise. In that vast region no one inquired whether marriage was a failure. Nothing that is old and long-beloved and human is a failure there.
In Tompkins Park, while they dodged babies and stepped around babies and over them, they saw many happy couples on the settees, and they noticed that often the men held their arms around the waists of their sweethearts. Girls, too, in other instances, leaned loving heads against the young men's breasts, blissfully regardless of publicity. They passed a young man and a woman kissing passionately, as kissing is described by unmarried girl novelists. Cordelia thought it no harm to nudge Mr. Fletcher and whisper:
"Sakes alive! They're right in it, ain't they. 'It's funny when you feel that way,' ain't it?"
As many another man who does not know the frankness and simplicity of the plain people might have done, Mr. Fletcher misjudged the girl. He thought her the sort of girl he was far from seeking. He grew instantly cold and reserved, and she knew, vaguely, that she had displeased him.
"I think people who make love in public should be locked up," said he.
"Some folks wants everybody put away that enjoys themselves," said Cordelia. Then, lest she had spoken too strongly, she added, "Present company not intended, Mr. Fletcher, but you said that like them mission folks that come around praising themselves and tellin' us all we're wicked."
"And do you think a girl can be good who behaves so in public?"
"I know plenty that's done it," said she; "and I don't know any girls but what's good. They 'ain't got wings, maybe, but you don't want to monkey with 'em, neither."
He recollected her words for many a year afterward and pondered them, and perhaps they enlarged his understanding. She also often thought of his condemnation of love-making out-of-doors. Kissing in public, especially promiscuous kissing, she knew to be a debatable pastime, but she also knew that there was not a flat in the Big Barracks in which a girl could carry on a courtship. Fancy her attempting it in her front room, with the room choked with people, with the baby squalling, and her little brothers and sisters quarrelling, with her mother entertaining half a dozen women visitors with tea or beer, and with a man or two dropping in to smoke with her father! Parlor courtship was to her, like precise English, a thing only known in novels. The thought of novels floated her soul back into the dream state.
"I think Cordelia's a pretty name," said Fletcher, cold at heart but struggling to be companionable.