The house is silent; and she knows the old people are down below, and she must go and read to them. But the vault of heaven has been unfathomably blue, that day; and she has been looking into it, over the crowded city walls. She knows that Arthur is not thinking of it, or of her. And now the air has faded to the lilac winter twilight, and all men are going, tired, to their homes. But she is idle; and idle hours she finds so hard to fill! She took a book she loved, and read; but gradually the dark came, and the book fell from her hand; and now her hands are on her face, and her soft eyes closed, and she is crying, silently. CHAPTER XXXI. THE FINANCIER’S DINNER. The new year has come; and all the world has been celebrating, with children’s dances and with children’s dinners and with a multiplicity of costly toys, the birth of Christ. Grown-up people who have been good-natured have assisted, and helped their boys play with candles and with evergreens as they helped them play with fire-crackers on the fourth of July, that other great feast or holy-day our calendar still keeps. Grown people who have not been good-natured have kept to their clubs, mostly, men to men; and the women have snatched the chance to get a week of resting and a little early sleep. For now the children’s play is over; and the winter’s balls are to begin in earnest, a serious business, as we have said. On the evening of December thirty-first, young Townley was invited to dine with his partner, Mr. Phineas Tamms, in Brooklyn. He never liked these dinners; but yet he learned too much from them to stay away. A voyage to Brooklyn combined all the discomforts of a trip to Europe, without the excitement and rewards--as he said at his favorite Columbian Club, where he stopped to take a modest tonic on his way down-town. “I wish I were going,” said one of the circle, who dallied a little in stocks, “and had your chance of getting points.” For these dinners of Tamms, the great street leader, were known as meetings where many schemes were laid, and information gleaned, as Tamms unbended after dinner, worth many thousands for each syllable, in gold. “Yes,” said old Mr. Townley, wagging his gray head sagely, “my partner is a very able young man--a very able young man indeed.” He was taking nothing; but it was his usual hour to be at the club; and the New Year’s time inclined the old gentleman to kindliness for all the world; so he had left his private and particular seat by the window and joined the group of younger fellows, to see how “his Boys” (as he called all young men he knew) were getting along. As such, he was liked by them; and treated with but the faintest tinge of patronage his age made necessary. “What do you think of the market, Mr. Townley?” said one of them with a manner of much deference. “We have had a long spell of sag, and the public are not in it.”