“My son!  My little boy!  My little boy!”

Where Broadway leaves off its roof-follies and its water-dancing, its eighty-odd theaters and its very odd Hawaiian cabarets, upper Broadway, widening slightly, takes up its macadamized rush through the city in block-square apartment-houses, which rise off plate-glass foundations of the de-luxe greengrocer shops, the not-so-green beauty-parlors, and the dyeing-and-cleaning, automobile-supplies, and confectionery establishments of middle New York.

In a no-children-allowed, swimming-pool, electric-laundry, roof-garden, dogs’-playground, cold-storage apartment most recently erected on a block-square tract of upper Broadway, belonging to and named after the youngest scion of an ancestor whose cow-patches had turned to kingdoms, the fifteenth layer of this gigantic honeycomb overlooked from its seventeen outside windows the great Babylonian valley of the city, the wide blade of the river shining and curving slightly like an Arabian dagger, and the embankment of New Jersey’s Palisades piled against the sky with the effect of angry horizon.

Nights, viewed from one of the seventeen windows, it was as if the river flowed under a sullen sheath which undulated to its curves.  On clear days it threw off light like parrying steel in sunshine.

Were days when, gazing out toward it, Mrs. Ross, whose heart was like a slow ache of ever-widening area, could almost feel its laving quality and, after the passage of a tug- or pleasure-boat, the soothing folding of the water down over and upon itself.  Often, with the sun setting pink and whole above the Palisades, the very copper glow which was struck off the water would beat against her own west windows, and, as if smarting under the brilliance, tears would come, sometimes staggering and staggering down, long after the glow was cold.  With such a sunset already waned, and the valley of unrest fifteen stories below popping out into electric signs and the red danger-lanterns of streets constantly in the remaking, Mrs. Harry Ross, from the corner window of her seventeen, looked down on it from under lids that were rimmed in red.

Beneath the swirl of a gown that lay in an iridescent avalanche of sequins about her feet, her foot, tilted to an unbelievable hypothenuse off a cloth-of-silver heel, beat a small and twinkling tattoo, her fingers tattooing, too, along the chair-sides.

How insidiously do the years nibble in! how pussy-footed and how cocksure the crow’s-feet!  One morning, and the first gray hair, which has been turning from the cradle, arrives.  Another, the mirror shows back a sag beneath the eyes.  That sag had come now to Mrs. Ross, giving her eye-sockets a look of unconquerable weariness.  The streak of quicksilver had come, too, but more successfully combated.  The head lying back against the brocade chair was guilty of new gleams.  Brass, with a greenish alloy.  Sitting there with the look of unshed tears seeming to form a film over her gaze, it was as if the dusk, flowing into a silence that was solemnly shaped to receive it, folded her in, more and more obscuring her.