The Selling Price

The humidity increased; the horses' heads hung heavily under their ridiculously pitiful straw bonnets. When the sun was vertical nobody stirred; when the bluish shadows began to creep out over baked sidewalks, broadening to a strip of superheated shade, a few stirred abroad in the deserted streets; here a policeman, thin blue summer tunic open, helmet in hand, swabbing the sweat from forehead and neck; there a white uniformed street sweeper dragging his rubber-edged mop or a section of wet hose; perhaps a haggard peddler of lemonade making for the Park wall around the Metropolitan Museum where, a little later, the East Side would venture out to sit on the benches, or the great electric tourists' busses would halt to dump out a living cargo--perhaps only the bent figure of a woman, very shabby, very old, dragging her ancient bones along the silent splendour of Fifth Avenue, and peering about the gutters for something she never finds--always peering, always mumbling the endless, wordless, soundless miserere of the poor.

Quarrier's huge limestone mansion, looming golden in the sun, was tenantless; its owner, closing even The Sedges, his Long Island house, and driven northward for a breath of air, was expected at Shotover.

The house of Mrs. Mortimer was closed and boarded up; the Caithness mansion was closed; the Ferralls', the Bonnesdels', the Pages', the Shannons', Mrs. Vendenning's, all were sealed up like vaults. A caretaker apparently guarded Major Belwether's house, peeping out at intervals from behind the basement windows. As for Plank's great pile of masonry, edging the outer Hundreds in the north, several lighted windows were to be seen in it at night, and a big yellow and black touring-car whizzed down town from its bronze gateway every morning with perfect regularity.