As the steamer slipped westward my spirits rose, to reach a climax of exhilaration when I saw the towers of New York rise gleaming like huge stalagmites in the early winter sun.  Maude likened them more happily—­to gigantic ivory chessmen.  Well, New York was America’s chessboard, and the Great Players had already begun to make moves that astonished the world.  As we sat at breakfast in a Fifth Avenue hotel I ran my eye eagerly over the stock-market reports and the financial news, and rallied Maude for a lack of spirits.

“Aren’t you glad to be home?” I asked her, as we sat in a hansom.

“Of course I am, Hugh!” she protested.  “But—­I can’t look upon New York as home, somehow.  It frightens me.”

I laughed indulgently.

“You’ll get used to it,” I said.  “We’ll be coming here a great deal, off and on.”

She was silent.  But later, when we took a hansom and entered the streams of traffic, she responded to the stimulus of the place:  the movement, the colour, the sight of the well-appointed carriages, of the well-fed, well-groomed people who sat in them, the enticement of the shops in which we made our purchases had their effect, and she became cheerful again....

In the evening we took the “Limited” for home.

We lived for a month with my mother, and then moved into our own house.  It was one which I had rented from Howard Ogilvy, and it stood on the corner of Baker and Clinton streets, near that fashionable neighbourhood called “the Heights.”  Ogilvy, who was some ten years older than I, and who belonged to one of our old families, had embarked on a career then becoming common, but which at first was regarded as somewhat meteoric:  gradually abandoning the practice of law, and perceiving the possibilities of the city of his birth, he had “gambled” in real estate and other enterprises, such as our local water company, until he had quadrupled his inheritance.  He had built a mansion on Grant Avenue, the wide thoroughfare bisecting the Heights.  The house he had vacated was not large, but essentially distinctive; with the oddity characteristic of the revolt against the banal architecture of the 80’s.  The curves of the tiled roof enfolded the upper windows; the walls were thick, the note one of mystery.  I remember Maude’s naive delight when we inspected it.

“You’d never guess what the inside was like, would you, Hugh?” she cried.

From the panelled box of an entrance hall one went up a few steps to a drawing-room which had a bowed recess like an oriel, and window-seats.  The dining-room was an odd shape, and was wainscoted in oak; it had a tiled fireplace and (according to Maude) the “sweetest” china closet built into the wall.  There was a “den” for me, and an octagonal reception-room on the corner.  Upstairs, the bedrooms were quite as unusual, the plumbing of the new pattern, heavy and imposing.  Maude expressed the air of seclusion when she exclaimed that she could almost imagine herself in one of the mediaeval towns we had seen abroad.