“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.

The Marches talked of these and other facts of their appearance, and curiously questioned whether this were the best that a great material civilization could come to; it looked a little dull.  The men’s faces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women’s were pretty and knowing, and yet dull.  It was, probably, the holiday expression of the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather than books.

Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have been as common-minded as they looked.  “But,” March said, “I understand now why the poor people don’t come up here and live in this clean, handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death.  On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself.”