many gleaming brass knockers and glass doorknobs, so many shallow bow windows, lacy iron balconies, and classic white porticoes. New York was not so chastely elegant.
A little, active creature in high stock, high hat, gaiters, and tightly buttoned overcoat see-sawed past her. His face was alive with benign intelligence. He must be famous—perhaps Dr. Holmes, who was so droll. The powerful Olympian with flowing cape and beard and majestic stride, why, he might be Professor Longfellow! Perhaps it is Harriet Beecher Stowe herself, this lady with the pointed face, draggled petticoats, and ancient straw hat. Even the children looked distinguished and well-grounded in Greek. Lanice remembered that Margaret Fuller had read the classics at seven, and gazed reverently at a little girl with bulging forehead and dangling legs and arms. She gaped at Boston coming and going over its criss-cross little board walks raised above the mundane slush. Boston, Boston, Boston! In her excitement she forgot the ideal expression for one of her sex, which should be chaste and sober and elegant, and something delightful flamed up and fled over her slim red mouth and glittered in her long black eyes. So with beauty she looked upon Boston. 'This,' she thought, 'is my oyster, as somebody—perhaps George Washington—once said of something else.' Boston, Boston! She saw its doorways, its Common, its chimney pots. She saw the sky. She saw herself suddenly as a part of all this and wondered why she had been frightened at the station.
