This by way of anticipation. What the doctor has said of exercise being a habit which grows easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes of walking that are wearisome. I find myself strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind, Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now on a different Broadway. The crowd is no longer north and south, but flows in every direction. It is churned up at every corner and spreads itself across the squares and open places. Its appearance has changed. It is no longer a factory population. Women still predominate, but they are the women of the professions and trades which centre about Madison Square--business women of independent standing, women from the magazine offices, the publishing houses, the insurance offices. You detect the bachelor girl in the current which sets in toward the home quarters of the undomesticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating-places whose fixed _table d'hôte_ prices flash out in illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther north and the crowd becomes tinged with the current of that Broadway which the outside world knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the workers, men in English clothes with canes, women with plumes and jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat of Little Old New York.
The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die down as quickly almost as they manifested themselves. The idlers and those who minister to them have heard the call of the dinner hour and have vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters by no means in keeping with the cut of their garments and their apparent indifference to useful employment. Soon the street is almost empty. It is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval between the last of the matinée and shopping crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The monster electric sign-boards have not begun to gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye and the senses. At night the electric Niagara hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety wooden hoardings. Not an imperial street this Broadway at 6.30 of a summer's afternoon. Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops, cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy little newspaper agencies and ticket-offices, and 'demonstration' stores for patent foods, patent waters, patent razors.