"Oh, certainly not; you never did--I _don't_ think." "Upon my honor, Miss Mahoney, I know only one woman in this city--Miss Whitfield, the doctor's daughter, who lives in the same house with you; and only one other in the world--my aunt, who brought me up, in Vermont." Well indeed did Cordelia know this. All the neighborhood knew it, and most of the other girls were conscious of a little flutter in their breasts when his eyes fell upon them in the streets, for it was the gossip of all who knew his workmen that the prosperous ladder-builder lived in his factory, where his had spent the life of a monk, without any society except of his canaries, his books, and his workmen. "Well, I declare!" sighed Cordelia. "How terrible cunning you men are, to get up such a story to make all the girls think you're romantic!" But, oh, how happy Cordelia was! At last she had met her prince--the future Mayor--her Sultan of the gilded halls. In that humid, sticky, midsummer heat among the tenements, every other woman dragged along as if she weighed a thousand pounds, but Cordelia felt like a feather floating among clouds. The babel--did the reader ever walk up Forsyth Street on a hot night, into Second Avenue, and across to Avenue A, and up to Tompkins Park? The noise of the tens of thousands on the pavements makes a babel that drowns the racket of the carts and cars. The talking of so many persons, the squalling of so many babies, the mothers scolding and slapping every third child, the yelling of the children at play, the shouts and loud repartee of the men and women--all these noises rolled together in the air makes a steady hum and roar that not even the breakers on a hard sea-beach can equal. You might say that the tenements were empty, as only the very sick, who could not move, were in them. For miles and miles they were bare of humanity, each flat unguarded and unlocked, with the women on the sidewalks, with the youngest children in arms or in perambulators, while those of the next sizes romped in the streets; with the girls and boys of fourteen giggling in groups in the doorways (the age and places where sex first asserts itself), and only the young men and women missing; for they were in the parks, on the wharves, and on the roofs, all frolicking and love-making. And every house front was like a Russian stove, expending the heat it had sucked from the all-day sun. And every door and window breathed bad air--air without oxygen, rich and rank and stifling.