Next, Sam Lewis’s cabriolet pulled up, with an excessive amount of jingling and bridle-shaking. It was a very nobby job indeed, this carriage, with shining brasses, a black leather hood, and body panels finished in shining Brewster green paint. The coachman wore a grey brass-buttoned coat, and a black beaver hat, and sported one of the reddest noses that Collis could ever remember, and he could remember a few. He climbed down and assisted Knickerbocker Jane and Ursula to mount up, and then he helped Collis and Sam Lewis aboard.

Outside the white-porticoed theatre, with its flaring lamps, the plaza was an impossible confusion of surreys and coaches and shouting people. Collis, looking around, could see the black-and-carmine carriages of the very rich, the South Park millionaires, and the light yellow-and-beige runabouts of the young and debonair. There was a smell of excitement and fog in the evening air, and everywhere around there were men in evening dress with white ties and curved white shirt fronts and silver-topped canes, and women with velvet evening cloaks and sparkling jewellery. Perfume and cigar smoke rose into the fog, and from the alley beside the theatre came the spicy aroma of shrimp chop suey, stirred over a makeshift charcoal fire by a pigtailed Chinese. It was impossible for Collis to decide which of the handsome couples who were alighting from their carriages and making their way through the wide-open doors of the theatre were respectable, and socially elevated, and which were not. After all, in a city where desk clerks wore diamonds and prostitutes were dressed in the latest French fashions, it was often the respectable who followed the styles of the sleazy, instead of the other way about. Collis pointed to one gorgeous creature who wore a glittering tiara and was arrayed in ostrich feathers dyed dark blue, and was told by Knickerbocker Jane that this was Harriet DeLancey, the most expensive prostitute in the whole city. But she also pointed out the Thomas Selbys, looking absurdly pleased with themselves as they were helped from their coach; and the fat little Milton Lathams; and Senator William Gwin, dignified as a sailing yacht, with his wife Mary Bell. Someone let off some Chinese firecrackers, rattling and popping, and there was a good deal of laughter and shouting, and loud abuse from a coachman whose horses had been frightened.

‘Can you see the Melfords here?’ Collis asked in Knickerbocker Jane’s ear.

She shook her head. ‘They usually arrive late, so that everybody will notice them. They have a reserved box in the front.’

‘Then I shan’t miss seeing them?’

‘Oh, no. You won’t miss seeing the Melfords.’

Their cabriolet was able to push its way to the front of the theatre at last, and they were assisted on to the crowded boardwalk by Sam Lewis’s coachman. Sam Lewis, head and shoulders above the throng of people, announced, ‘We’re going to walk to the Oriental for dinner when all this dangdratted thespianism is over. So meet us there at twelve, precise.’