The green lights winked out, the red lights blinked on, and at the corner a policeman held up the hand of authority. Undoubtedly she said to herself that this was modern nonsense; for she lifted the speaking-trumpet to her lips and, I was sure, directed the coachman--his name was beautifully Higginson--to drive on. As she thus infringed the law, she sat with unyielding spine and met the cold stare of the lions in front of the Library and returned it with a stare as impersonally disparaging as their own. Not an emotion disturbed her features. She drove against the lights because she had never consented to recognize the lights. The hoofs of her horses seemed to make a sharper sound then ever, as Higginson flourished his whip over the sleek flanks of his pride and joy. And this breach of regulations apparently delighted the elderly coachman and left the elderly lady as it found her, indifferent. The policeman grinned at the bays whose tails, bobbed and gaily twitching, seemed to mock him, and, turning to the columns of automobiles over which he had control, shared the joke with various chauffeurs. As I halted on the curb, irresolute because without Mrs. Van Suydam’s scornful sureness, I heard him remark: “The ol’ girl don’t seem to take it in that she might get killed.” In this he was right. Mrs. Van Suydam had never recognized violent death. Her lips moved: was it possible that she muttered? I followed the dart of her eyes as she stabbed with them a building in process of blatant construction. Her mutter had consisted of two short, sharp ejaculations, and embodied her ideas on progress. “Humph! Indeed!” This new architecture, which must have affronted her taste because of its difference from the red brick and white trim of her New York, was partly of her son’s making. She could not but feel that, in pursuing his ambition to build greatly, he had fallen into vagary. New York had been a pleasant town. By day the air had been clear and good to breathe, and by night a clean and intimate moon had looked down on family life. These days, the moon came up only to be faded by the vulgarity of beacons on spiky towers. The moon flinched: as she flinched: as she could wish that her son flinched. The ringing sound of hoofs beat defiantly against the steady drone of motors rolling in two solid columns up and down the Avenue, and the snub nose of the perfect Higginson rose in air polluted by carbon monoxide. Charles Glidden had lost no urbanity since I had last seen him. He had only one surprise up his sleeve: he was prepared to talk, and to talk about Eva, and it only required my question of how she was making out with the Van Suydams to bring it about. “I think it’s rather funny that she married that particular man,” I gurgled, with Mrs. Van Suydam in my mind’s eye.