red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe; though this was an article
which, for many years, she had coveted in secret. It made her look,
when she sported it, like a woman of thirty; but oddly enough, in
spite of her taste for fine clothes, she had not a grain of coquetry,
and her anxiety when she put them on was as to whether they, and not
she, would look well. It is a point on which history has not been
explicit, but the assumption is warrantable; it was in the royal
raiment just mentioned that she presented herself at a little
entertainment given by her aunt, Mrs. Almond. The girl was at this
time in her twenty-first year, and Mrs. Almond's party was the
beginning of something very important.

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his
household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living
ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite
copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street
within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days
(from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of
fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York,
thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do,
and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of
Broadway. By the time the Doctor changed his residence the murmur of
trade had become a mighty uproar, which was music in the ears of all
good citizens interested in the commercial development, as they
delighted to call it, of their fortunate isle. Dr. Sloper's interest
in this phenomenon was only indirect--though, seeing that, as the
years went on, half his patients came to be overworked men of
business, it might have been more immediate--and when most of his
neighbours' dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings and large
fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and shipping