The Englishman stood decently to receive those invited to meet him and no one wasted a minute on him. In a mild aside to those of us within hearing, he said that it was very New York. He stood watching the people who did not so much as glance at him because already they knew how he looked. They were in perpetual motion. They drew together and fell apart; and so quickly did they shift from group to group that one got the impression of their never quite closing their lips: what they had started to say in one group was continued in the next group in which they found themselves. It is impossible to accost a scuttling mouse: they dashed past the guest of honour with terrifying speed. The noise of the conclave surged down the stairs; and such was the volume of this concatenation that the elderly lady who now, with the most beautiful suddenness, appeared at the head of the stairs must have had to push against it as against material opposition. But this opposition which was not consciously directed against her had had, evidently, the effect of stiffening some as yet unrevealed resolution. Also, she might have been upheld by many taffeta petticoats. She was alone but gave the impression of being attended. And such was the security of her evident faith in her impregnable position that, too shrewd not to perceive that the crowd ignored her, she waved aside any discomfort arising from this by her own sweeping condemnation of all that she saw. Her cold grey eyes travelled from face to face, appraising with a complete and icy detachment--no interest whatever in who it might be the orbit of whose flight she chanced to observe. Beyond a few curious glances, the milling crowd paid no attention to her. From his far doorway, Spencer Mapes, however, stared with absorption. James Pomeroy, adjusting his pince-nez, his fingers using on its narrow black ribbon the tenderness of touch that he would use on a rare old book, came up to say to the Englishman, “I saw her--on her way here, although it didn’t occur to me that she could conceivably be on the way here--driving uptown in a horse-drawn carriage!” But, at one time or another, most people had seen her maroon brougham with a red-faced coachman in a puce livery expertly handling a pair of bays. She might be said to be the last of the old buildings now in process of demolition. In a backwash formed by the elderly lady’s antagonistic near presence, the small cluster of us stood staring. Novelists stare because they never know when they will use a person as a character in a story. They stare without blinking, making no excuse to the object of their fixed regard; they are working a photographic memory. And here was a middle-aged woman who declined to appear younger than she was. It was a find. We examined her in unabashed glee.