The answer to that question was simple. Until some years ago, only poor people lived in apartments—houses split up by floors—or in tenements, where even the floors were subdivided. Splendid apartments might be a feature of great European capitals like Vienna and Paris. But not New York. The people you knew lived in houses.

Yet there were signs of change. Other apartment buildings had appeared in the city, though none as grand as the Dakota. The building, a somewhat barn-like version of the French Renaissance, stared rather bleakly across Central Park and the pond where people skated in winter. But, it had to be confessed, it had its points.

Aside from the monumental Indian motifs with which Mr. Clark had decorated the building, the apartments were huge, with plenty of servants’ quarters. With their soaring ceilings, the reception rooms in the largest apartments were quite as big as those in many mansions. And soon people noticed something else. These apartments were rather convenient. If you wanted to go to your country house for the summer months, for instance, you could safely lock your door without even leaving a housekeeper to mind the place. Before long people were even saying: “Oh, I know someone who lives there.”

Lily de Chantal, now in her fifties, had decided to give the Dakota a try. Today, she declared, she wouldn’t think of living anywhere else. She’d rented out the house she owned, invested her other savings, and was able to live quietly and pleasantly at the Dakota with a small staff. Her style of life was made all the more comfortable by the fact that Frank Master, discreetly, paid half the rent.

This afternoon, however, in answer to a note she’d received the day before, she was on her way to take tea, not with Frank, but with Hetty. And understandably, she was a little nervous.

She wondered what Hetty wanted.

March had only just started, but the day was surprisingly warm. As she passed along the south side of Central Park, she saw banks of daffodils. Only as she crossed the top of Sixth Avenue did she frown.

She had never reconciled herself to the long, ugly line of the raised railway that ran down Sixth these days. The El, they called it—the elevated railroads, whose puffing, sooty steam engines rushed their noisy carriages over the heads of ordinary mortals, twenty feet above the street. There were other lines on Second, Third and Ninth avenues, though the one on Ninth gave no trouble to the Dakota, she was glad to say. They were clearly necessary, since they carried over thirty million passengers a year. But for Lily, they represented the ugly side of the city’s huge progress that she didn’t want to see.

The sight of the El was soon past, and a long block later, at the corner of the park, she was turning into the pleasant environs of Fifth Avenue.