“Well, well! And then?”
“Well, then I think the crank comes in, in Mr. Lindau. He says there's no need of failures or frauds or hard times. It's ridiculous. There always have been and there always will be. But if you tell him that, it seems to make him perfectly furious.”
March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife. “I'm glad to know that Tom can see through such ravings. He has lots of good common sense.”
It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and they were sauntering up Fifth Avenue, and admiring the wide old double houses at the lower end; at one corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbows that a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of a garden wall—for its convenience in looking into the street, he said. The line of these comfortable dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken by the facades of shops; and March professed himself vulgarized by a want of style in the people they met in their walk to Twenty-third Street.
“Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives, Isabel,” he demanded. “I pine for the society of my peers.”
He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife get on the roof with him. “Think of our doing such a thing in Boston!” she sighed, with a little shiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recognition and comment.
“You wouldn't be afraid to do it in London or Paris?”
“No; we should be strangers there—just as we are in New York. I wonder how long one could be a stranger here.”
“Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living. The place is really vast, so much larger than it used to seem, and so heterogeneous.”
When they got down very far up-town, and began to walk back by Madison Avenue, they found themselves in a different population from that they dwelt among; not heterogeneous at all; very homogeneous, and almost purely American; the only qualification was American Hebrew. Such a well-dressed, well-satisfied, well-fed looking crowd poured down the broad sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March could easily pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last. Still he expressed his doubts whether this Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed to be a thing of custom, represented the best form among the young people of that region; he wished he knew; he blamed himself for becoming of a fastidious conjecture; he could not deny the fashion and the richness and the indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders looked New-Yorky; they were the sort of people whom you would know for New-Yorkers elsewhere,—so well equipped and so perfectly kept at all points. Their silk hats shone, and their boots; their frocks had the right distension behind, and their bonnets perfect poise and distinction.