Beth got into the victoria and sank back on its mulberry-colored seat letting the footman draw around her the great bear robe, knowing now without doubt that she was Cinderella under the blessed spell of her fairy godmother’s magic. The footman climbed up beside the coachman, folded his mulberry-colored arms across his mulberry-colored breast--Beth did not yet know that Aunt Alida’s livery was mulberry-colored. The coachman gathered up the reins, holding his whip stiffly from under the fur cape that covered his mulberry-colored shoulders. The splendid horses, quite as splendid and prancing as any that drew the chariots in the June circus procession at home, started, champing their way slowly down the broad avenue beginning to fill with gay equipages, private and public. Beth could hardly reply to Aunt Alida’s remarks. Her aunt saw that the child was swallowed up in the brilliant novelty of the great city, deliciously quivering lest they run into, or were run into by the vehicles that crowded the thoroughfare increasingly as they descended toward Murray Hill. The sun was shining from a cloudless sky, the rare, fleckless, one might almost say animated sky of a perfect autumn day in New York. The metropolis was giving its best--and New York’s best is much--to the little girl who had come to see it. Aunt Alida kindly let Beth alone to drink in and enjoy her first impressions in her own way. At a point where another broad street, this one alive with trolley cars, crossed the avenue on which they drove, Beth saw that their driver bore to the right, increasing the dangers of this hair-erecting drive by threading his way across the double lines of trolleys. He stopped at last before a large store; its windows were full of entrancing things. The footman sprang down to open the door, and stiffly touched his hat to Beth as she descended, to her great embarrassment. She followed her aunt into the shop, straight to an up-stairs department. Mrs. Cortlandt asked to be shown something the name of which Beth did not catch. The saleswoman brought her boxes upon boxes of the daintiest white things--and they were all exactly the size that Beth could not help seeing would fit herself! Aunt Alida began to buy; Beth had never seen any one buy in this way. “Send me six of these, a dozen of those,” she ordered, and paid for nothing. But Beth saw that the people in the shop served her eagerly. Mrs. Cortlandt went swiftly from room to room. In the room where she looked at bewilderingly charming gowns, coats, guimpes, she began to consult Beth. “Since these are to be yours, my dear, you may as well tell me what you like best of those I am willing that you should have,” she said.