Their hotel was situated near the busy juncture with Broadway on Twenty-Third Street, with the charming small park of Madison Square nearby, no doubt a welcome oasis of green in spring. This was, according the information Marion had gleaned, at the limit of fashionable uptown when it was built about ten years previously. “Though that has all changed since,” she said as their cab jolted into action. “Mrs. William Astor, who is the arbiter of New York society and whose card, I noticed, was one of those left for you, has her mansion on Thirty-Fourth Street. I must say, this way of numbering the avenues and streets is eminently practical. It will make it quite difficult to get lost, though I am told that downtown, as it is referred to, is a different matter entirely. Not a place one ventures into, apparently.”

“You should not have said so, for now it is the one place in all New York I yearn to visit,” Margaret quipped.

“Ha! We shall content ourselves with uptown today, and the new Central Park. Though it seems to be acceptable for a young woman to go about unescorted, there are certain areas which would be foolhardy to venture into, never mind unescorted. I know you are teasing, but you will remember, Margaret, that it will undoubtedly be as easy here as it is in London to accidentally find yourself in an unsavoury district.”

“I am aware, and I was teasing. A little, anyway. Goodness, but isn’t it busy, and so very different from London. The pavements look as if they have been swept clean.”

“Sidewalks,” Marion corrected. “And this is Fifth Avenue, where the great and the good reside.”

Margaret looked about her, slightly awed by the city unfurling before her. There were two sets of tracks for the horse-drawn trams which she must remember to call streetcars, one of the many obstacles their driver faced, for despite the width of the street—avenue!—there were vast amounts of traffic. And throngs of people, too, all of them, it seemed to her, walking very quickly and purposefully. As the cab made its slow way north, the sidewalks gradually became less crowded, the buildings more widely spaced, interspersed with trees and several extremely well-kept churches. There was an air of permanence here that belied Marion’s assertion that this part of the city had, as recently as fifteen years ago, been little more than mud, hovels, and farmland. The mansions were tall, square, and similar in proportions, the brown-stone of the façades presenting a pleasing uniform appearance.