So to the German’s they went, and Clarice fancied herself at the Casino in Newport.  All the girls around her, who seemed to be trying to swallow the spoons, took on the guise of blue-blooded belles, while the noisy boys and young men (calling out, “Hully gee, fellers! look at Nifty gittin’ out der winder widout payin’!” and, “Say, Tilly, what kind er cream is dat you’re feedin’ your face wid?”) seemed to her so many millionaires and the exquisite sons thereof.  To Mr. Fletcher the German’s back-yard saloon, with its green lattice walls, and its rusty dead Christmas trees in painted butter-kegs, appeared uncommonly brilliant and fine.  The fact that whenever he took a swallow of water the ice-cream turned to cold candle-grease in his mouth made no difference.  He was happy, and Cordelia was in an ecstasy by the time he had paid a shock-headed, bare-armed German waiter, and they were again on the avenue side by side.  She put out her hand and rested it on his arm again—­to make sure she was Clarice.

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.