The Story of a Play by William Dean Howells

The Maxwells went to New York early in October, and took a little furnished flat for the winter on the West Side, between two streets among the Eighties. It was in a new apartment-house, rather fine on the outside, and its balconies leaned caressingly towards the tracks of the Elevated Road, whose trains steamed back and forth under them night and day. At first they thought it rather noisy, but their young nerves were strong, and they soon ceased to take note of the uproar, even when the windows were open.

The weather was charming, as the weather of the New York October is apt to be. The month proved much milder than September had been at Magnolia. They were not very far from Central Park, and they went for whole afternoons into it. They came to have such a sense of ownership in one of the seats in the Ramble, that they felt aggrieved when they found anybody had taken it, and they resented other people's intimacy with the squirrels, which Louise always took a pocketful of nuts to feed; the squirrels got a habit of climbing into her lap for them. Sometimes Maxwell hired a boat and rowed her lazily about on the lake, while he mused and she talked. Sometimes, to be very lavish, they took places in the public carriage which plied on the drives of the Park, and went up to the tennis-grounds beyond the reservoirs, and watched the players, or the art-students sketching the autumn scenery there. They began to know, without acquaintance, certain attached or semi-attached couples; and no doubt they passed with these for lovers themselves, though they felt a vast superiority to them in virtue of their married experience; they looked upon them, though the people were sometimes their elders, as very young things, who were in the right way, but were as yet deplorably ignorant how happy they were going to be. They almost always walked back from these drives, and it was not so far but they could walk over to the North River for the sunset before their dinner, which they had late when they did that, and earlier when they did not do it. Dinner was rather a matter of caprice with them.