* * * * * The conductor of the green omnibus thrusts his green fare-box under your nose. You find two dimes and drop it into the contrivance. "You can get more value for less money and less value for much money in New York than in any other large city in the world," says Katherine. She is right--and you know that she is right. You can have a glorious ride up the street, that even in its days of social decadence is still the finest highway in the land--a ride that continues across the town and up its parked rim for long miles--for a mere ten cents of Uncle Sam's currency and as for the reverse--well you are going to dinner in a smart hotel with Katherine in a little while. You swing across Broadway and up the west edge of Madison square, catch a single, wondering close-at-hand glimpse of the white campanile of the Metropolitan tower which dominates that open place and so all but replaces Diana on her perch above Madison Square Garden--a landmark of the New York of a quarter of a century ago and which is apt to come into the hands of the wreckers almost any day now. Now you are at the south edge of the new shopping district, although some of the ultra places below Thirty-fourth street have begun to move into that portion of the avenue just south of Central Park. In a little while they may be stealing up the loveliest portion of the avenue--from Fifty-ninth street north. The great shops dominate the avenue. And if you look with sharp eyes as the green bus bears you up this _via sacre_, you may see that one of the greatest ones--a huge department store encased in architecturally superb white marble--bears no sign or token of its ownership or trade. An oversight, you think. Not a bit of it. Four blocks farther up the avenue is another great store in white marble--a jewelry shop of international reputation. You will have to scan its broad _façade_ closely indeed before you find the name of the firm in tiny letters upon the face of its clock. Oversight? Not a bit of it. It is the ultra of shop-keeping in New York--the assumption that the shop is so well known that it need not be placarded to the vulgar world. And if strangers from other points fail to identify it--well that is because of their lack of knowledge and the shopkeeper may secretly rejoice.