Summer smouldered in the city.  The sun seemed to have been shining hot and merciless for hours when Martie rose at six, to stand yawning at her window.  At nine families began to stream by, to the Park; perspiring mothers pushing the baby carriages, small children, already eating, staggering before and behind.  By ten the streets were deserted, baked, silent, glaring.  Martie and Mrs. Curley would establish themselves in a cool back room, as to-day, with a pitcher of iced tea near at hand.

Somehow the hot, empty hours dragged by.  At four o’clock the two, with perhaps a friend or two who had come in, would begin to gasp that this was the worst yet.  This was awful.  The heat had a positive and brassy quality, there was no air stirring.  The children in the Park would drag home in the hot sunset light, tired, dirty, whining, and a breathless evening follow the burning day.  Then Martie and Mrs. Curley and mild little Mr. Bull and bellicose Mr. Snow would perhaps sit on the steps until eleven o’clock, exchanging pleasantries with various neighbours, wilted like themselves in the furnace of the day.

Martie liked the sense of extremes, as they all did.  In a few months they would be shaking their heads over a blizzard with the same solemn enjoyment.  She liked the suddenly darkening sky, the ominous rattle of thunder; “like boxes being smashed,” she wrote Sally.  She fairly sang when the rain began to stream down, washing, cooling, cleansing.

From the window of the back bedroom she looked down to-day upon a stretch of bare, fenced backyards.  Here and there a cat slept in the shade, or moved silently from shadow to shadow.  From some of the opposite windows strings of washed garments depended, and upon one fire-escape two girls were curled, talking and reading.

Her hostess was the source of much affectionate amusement to Martie, and as the old lady liked nothing so much as an appreciative listener, they got on splendidly.  Martie laughed at the older woman’s accounts of quarrels, births, and law-suits, thrilled over the details of sudden deaths, murders, and mysteries, and drank in with a genuine dramatic appreciation the vision of a younger, simpler city.  No subway, no telephones, no motor cars, no elevated roads—­what had New York been like when Mrs. Curley was a bride?  Booth and Parepa Rosa and Adelina Patti walked the boards again; the terrible Civil War was fought; the draft riots raged in the streets; the great President was murdered.  There was no old family in the city of whose antecedents Mrs. Curley did not know something.  “The airs of them!” she would say, musing over a newspaper list of “among those present.”  “I could tell them something!”