New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Women white collar workers -- Fiction
The familiar faces of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions were awaiting them at
the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry-boat, and New York
immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long
vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevateds,
shop windows that seemed dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of
people as made her feel insecure, cling to the Sessionses, and try to
ward off the dizziness of the swirl of new impressions. She was daunted
for a moment, but she rejoiced in the conviction that she was going to
like this madness of multiform energy.
The Sessionses lived in a flat on Amsterdam Avenue near Ninety-sixth
Street. They all went up from Cortlandt Street in the Subway, which was
still new and miraculous in 1905. For five minutes Una was terrified by
the jam of people, the blind roar through tunneled darkness, the sense
of being powerlessly hurled forward in a mass of ungovernable steel. But
nothing particularly fatal happened; and she grew proud to be part of
this black energy, and contentedly swung by a strap.
When they reached the Sessionses' flat and fell upon the gossip of
Panama, Pennsylvania, Una was absent-minded--except when the Sessionses
teased her about Henry Carson and Charlie Martindale. The rest of the
time, curled up on a black-walnut couch which she had known for years in
Panama, and which looked plaintively rustic here in New York, Una gave
herself up to impressions of the city: the voices of many children down
on Amsterdam Avenue, the shriek of a flat-wheeled surface car, the
sturdy pound of trucks, horns of automobiles; the separate sounds
scarcely distinguishable in a whirr which seemed visible as a thick,
gray-yellow dust-cloud.
Her mother went to lie down; the Sessionses (after an elaborate
explanation of why they did not keep a maid) began to get dinner, and
Una stole out to see New York by herself.
It all seemed different, at once more real and not so jumbled together,
now that she used her own eyes instead of the guidance of that knowing
old city bird, Mr. Albert Sessions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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