Julia was hurrying across the dining room, paler than ever now; then, running a little, she crossed the parlor, and we heard her running steps up the carpeted stairs. I'd left my packed bag in the hallway, my coat and hat hanging on the big mirrored stand there, and I didn't stay; I wasn't needed. I turned to Aunt Ada, said I had to leave immediately, and she smiled distractedly, shaking my hand across the tabletop, and murmuring good wishes. I said goodbye to the others, who replied with their eyes flicking toward the staircase in the hall. And then I was outside, walking toward Twenty-third Street.

At Lexington Avenue I took a hansom cab and sat back with my eyes closed. I had no interest at all just now in anything outside. I paid off the cab at Fifty-ninth and Fifth Avenue, where Kate and I had come out of Central Park. And now I walked back into it, and then along the paths, under the occasional lights, heading north and west through the dark unchanging park; and presently, ahead, I saw the gabled bulk of the Dakota, its gaslighted windows, and the flickering candle and kerosene lights of the truck farms beside it.

16

I gave myself a vacation next day. I convinced myself I deserved it and I knew I needed it: needed a transition between the two worlds and times. I'd slept in the Dakota apartment, and while I doubted that I had to do this anymore, I induced a light hypnosis just before going to sleep. Lying in the darkness in the big carved-wood bedstead in the same nightgown I'd worn at 19 Gramercy Park, I knew that far downtown the old post office stood, its lobby lighted by a few globed gas jets; that the big thermometer in its narrow wooden sentry-box stood before Hudnut's Pharmacy in the darkness of lower Broadway, probably registering close to zero with no one to look at it now; that a few tiny locomotives were following the beams of their kerosene headlamps along the El tracks over the cobbled late-at-night streets of New York. But in the morning, I told myself, I would awaken back in my own time. I began to wonder how I'd feel about that this time, but you're entirely relaxed in self-hypnosis, more than halfway to sleep, and before I could really begin thinking I was asleep all the way.

In the morning, lying in bed for a few moments after opening my eyes, I felt certain I knew where and when I was, and several seconds later had proof. I heard a sound I knew but couldn't place for an instant: a far-off, high and faintly ominous whine. Then I said it aloud — "A jet" — but I hadn't really needed that sign: I already knew I was back, I could feel it.

Walking out of the Dakota onto Seventy-second Street half an hour later, I turned west, on my way to the warehouse and project, I thought. And then without any previous thought and without knowing why, I swung around, walked back to the street corner, and turned south.

I walked for block after block after block then, down through modern Manhattan — looking no different in my round fur cap, long overcoat, and my beard, mustache and long hair, than many another man I passed. I knew I ought to at least phone the project, and Kate. But instead I did what I wanted to do: I walked downtown, pausing momentarily at curbs to wait for flashing red DON'T WALK signs to turn green and say WALK; and I looked around me at today's streets, buildings, and people.

There is an astonishing amount left in New York of other times. You don't think so of New York, but once you're out of midtown Manhattan it's true. And presently, below Forty-second Street, I began to recognize buildings, and whole groups of buildings, that had survived from the eighties and earlier. But these weren't the similarities I was hunting for now; I was looking for them in people's faces, and I'm obliged to say I found hardly any.

I'm certain it wasn't a matter of clothes, of makeup or its absence, or of hair styles. Today's faces are different; they are much more alike and much less alive. On the streets of the eighties I saw human misery, as you see it today; and depravity, hopelessness, and greed; and in the faces of small boys on the streets I saw the premature hardness you see now in the faces of boys from Harlem. But there was also an excitement in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone.

It was in the faces of women moving along the Ladies' Mile and into and out of those splendid lost stores. Their faces were animated, they were glad to be just where they were, alive in that moment and place. It showed in the faces of the people I saw in Madison Square. You could look at their eyes as they passed and see the pleasure they felt at being outdoors, in the winter, in a city they liked. And the men of lower Broadway hurrying along the walks, conscious of time and money, stopping at noon to check the precision of their big watches with Western Union's red time-ball — well, their faces were often abstracted; some were worried; some were greedy or anxious, others complacent and going-to-live-forever. All sorts of expressions just as today, but they were also interested in their surroundings, pausing to check the temperature at Hudnut's giant thermometer. And above all, they carried with them a sense of purpose. You could see that: They weren't bored, for God's sake! Just looking at them, I'm convinced that those men moved through their lives in unquestioned certainty that there was a reason for being. And that's something worth having, and losing it is to lose something vital.

Faces don't have that look now; when alone they're blank, and closed in. I passed people in pairs or larger groups who were talking, sometimes laughing, occasionally more or less animated; but only as part of the group. They were shut off from the street around them, alien and separate from the city they lived in, suspicious of it, and that's not how New York was in the eighties.

I tested my impression. At Twenty-third Street I turned west, and walked to within half a block of Madison Square. Then I stood on the curb out of the way of pedestrians and looked at it, up ahead. From here it looked the same, physically. And people passed through and around it. But no one, and I'm certain you could see this, took any particular pleasure in it. New York was once a different place, and in many many ways.

Except for its uptown side, which was all solid apartments now, Gramercy Park was precisely the same, and so was Number 19. Once more now I stood on the walk looking up at it. There were lowered Venetian blinds in the first-floor windows but no other change I could see, and it seemed impossible that Julia and her aunt weren't somewhere inside it doing their morning's work. For once I let myself act on impulse before it had a chance to fade. I ran up the steps, and — another difference, but I shut my mind to it — pushed the electric bell. After fifteen seconds or so just as I was changing my mind, a woman opened the door and stood looking at me, brows lifted questioningly. She had thick white hair tied back off her forehead by a band; she was in her forties, I thought, but with a girl's figure, and she wore orange-colored pants, a matching turtleneck sweater, and a vest of some sort of silvery cloth. She looked very nice, and I pulled off my hat, and said, "I'm sorry, but — I knew the people here once. Some years ago. A Miss Julia Charbonneau and her aunt. But I can see they don't live here now."

"No," she said pleasantly. "We've lived here nine years, and the people before us were here for four; and their name wasn't Charbonneau."

I nodded, as though it were to be expected, as it certainly was. I was postponing the moment of leaving so that I could look into the hall, and she very politely stepped aside a little so that I could see better. The walls were papered in a fragile-looking blue pattern on white, and a magnificent crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. The hall looked expensive and utterly different, except for the black-and-white-tiled floor; that was the same.