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.

You had to say, Fifth was getting better and better. If the El was the necessary engine of New York’s burgeoning wealth, Fifth Avenue was becoming the stately apex. The avenue of palaces, the valley of kings. She’d only gone a short way when she passed what had once been the solitary mansion of the wicked Madame Restell. Solitary no longer. That notorious lady herself was no more, and across the street, now, the Vanderbilts had built their mighty mansions.

She passed the Cathedral of St. Patrick, all complete now, and soaring in Irish Catholic triumph over even those Vanderbilt mansions.

But despite the pace of advance, she was glad that only St. Patrick’s, and Trinity, Wall Street, and a handful of other church spires rose into the sky above the city. The great residential mansions were still only five stories high; indeed, the largest commercial structures, using cast-iron beams, were seldom more than ten.

Moreover, even the most lavish of the newer palaces, whose opulent decorations might have seemed overdone, vulgar, in fact, to the Federal generation, even these plutocratic treasure houses still relied upon the basic motifs of the classical world, as did their cast-iron counterparts. There was tradition, and craftsmanship, and humanity in them, every one.

The city might be vast, but it still retained its grace. And perhaps because she was getting older herself, this was important to her.

She passed the reservoir at Forty-second Street. In the Thirties came the mansions of the Astors. And then she was turning into Gramercy Park.

It was just the two of them, herself and Hetty Master. When she was ushered into the sitting room, Hetty welcomed her with a smile.