This might have been tempting. The coaches of the New York and Harlem Railroad were so plush that even the rich Wall Street men rode in them. Leaving from beside City Hall, they lumbered sedately northward past Five Points, then trundled up the Bowery and picked up Fourth Avenue. Until they reached the end of the residential neighborhoods, where quiet was demanded, they were pulled by teams of heavy horses. Above the residential area, the coaches were coupled to steam engines for the long journey up to Harlem.

“I can’t,” she said. “I promised to meet Gretchen along the way.”

“Oh God,” he cried. “I might have guessed. The chocolate girl. Little goody two-shoes.”

Mary might have said, “She doesn’t like you either.” But she didn’t.

“So it’s Gretchen that’s found you this position.”

“It’s a family she knows. I may not get it.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

They walked on together, past the hospital and the Masonic Hall. At Canal Street, Broadway rose a little where it had once crossed over marshy ground. A few minutes more and they came to Houston Street. Here the planned, rectangular grid of the new city, obscured by the older, V-shaped pattern at the southern end of the island, began to make itself plain. The cross-streets began to have numbers instead of names. At Grace Church, where Broadway made its turn, Mary said, “Gretchen’s meeting me up the road,” and her brother said grumpily that she could go on alone. But as they parted, he reminded her: “I shall find out all about this place, you know.”

Just so long as you don’t come there, she thought to herself.

Sure enough, at the corner of Union Square, there was Gretchen.

“Will I do, Gretchen?” Mary cried as she reached her. And she turned herself around to be inspected.

“You’re perfect,” her friend assured her.

“Not,” said Mary, with a sigh, “compared to you.” Small, proper, orderly, blue-eyed little Gretchen always had her face well scrubbed, and her golden hair pulled back and pinned. Not a hair out of place, not a speck of dust on her coat. She was as perfect as a china doll. But if Gretchen Keller was your friend, she never let you down.

The Kellers were German. They’d arrived in New York two years before Mary’s mother had died. Mr. Keller and his wife kept a little chocolate store on the Bowery at Sixth Street. Mr. Keller’s brother, Uncle Willy, kept a cigar store a few doors down, and Gretchen’s cousin Hans worked for a piano-maker in the same quarter.