The stench from the exhausts of automobiles, and the satanic thump of riveters at work, unable to escape from the earth’s envelope, hurled themselves back with malignancy, assaulting the senses with their hints of limbo. Along the side streets blew a clammy breath from rivers tainted as the air. A few dispirited snowflakes straggled downwards, as if aware that when they touched the pavement they would be violated by the grime of the life of a city. Pedestrians scooted, stopping erratically at the brink of the crossings, held back by the law but unprotected by these laws that they themselves had made. I found that already I had adjusted myself to great changes in New York: I dashed with the rest, for the short distance between the cross streets, keeping abreast of the motor traffic because at each of these crossings all living things, and all machinery, halted at the change of lights. Whenever we so halted, I looked fearfully up at cliffs of edifices. In these artificial cliffs at the base of which I in proportion crept, I seemed to feel the shaken fist of the city’s non-natural immensity. The sound of horses’ hoofs, competing by its very insignificance with the magnitude of the roar of the motor traffic, came up behind me. Without turning my head, I knew who drove so insolently up and down a regulated Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Van Suydam, Eva Litchfield’s mother-in-law, was the last of the elderly ladies who had used to take their airing in horse-drawn vehicles. Alone in her maroon brougham, refusing to enjoy the sights for which presumably she had come out, Mrs. Van Suydam did not relax; she sat upright because she had always sat straight, stood erect, and faced life with a stiff spine. She wore, as always, handsome black garments of a style introduced by Queen Alexandra. On her head perched her usual bonnet-like hat, made more secure in its insecurity by a tightly drawn wisp of veil ending at the tip of her intolerant nose. Never had Mrs. Van Suydam’s veil been observed to flutter, for hussies allowed their veils to flutter. Her eyelashes brushed against this mesh stretched in harlequin-like rhomboids, and were forced upward into rays, and lent her a startled aspect that belied her. Although she had driven uptown from her mansion in Washington Square North, she still tugged at her gloves that, in the fashion of the days when she was a girl and ladies had no use for their hands, were too small for her; she squeezed them over her palms and winced slightly; and as I watched her, in our parallel progress, she folded these white-kid-gloved hands of a lady, lifted her eyes against her veil, and stared icily ahead.