A Cup of Cold Water

It was three o'clock in the morning, and the cotillion was at its height,
when Woburn left the over-heated splendor of the Gildermere ballroom, and
after a delay caused by the determination of the drowsy footman to give
him a ready-made overcoat with an imitation astrachan collar in place of
his own unimpeachable Poole garment, found himself breasting the icy
solitude of the Fifth Avenue. He was still smiling, as he emerged from the
awning, at his insistence in claiming his own overcoat: it illustrated,
humorously enough, the invincible force of habit. As he faced the wind,
however, he discerned a providence in his persistency, for his coat was
fur-lined, and he had a cold voyage before him on the morrow.

It had rained hard during the earlier part of the night, and the carriages
waiting in triple line before the Gildermeres' door were still domed by
shining umbrellas, while the electric lamps extending down the avenue
blinked Narcissus-like at their watery images in the hollows of the
sidewalk. A dry blast had come out of the north, with pledge of frost
before daylight, and to Woburn's shivering fancy the pools in the pavement
seemed already stiffening into ice. He turned up his coat-collar and
stepped out rapidly, his hands deep in his coat-pockets.

As he walked he glanced curiously up at the ladder-like door-steps which
may well suggest to the future archaeologist that all the streets of New
York were once canals; at the spectral tracery of the trees about St.
Luke's, the fretted mass of the Cathedral, and the mean vista of the long
side-streets. The knowledge that he was perhaps looking at it all for the
last time caused every detail to start out like a challenge to memory, and
lit the brown-stone house-fronts with the glamor of sword-barred Edens.

It was an odd impulse that had led him that night to the Gildermere ball;
but the same change in his condition which made him stare wonderingly at
the houses in the Fifth Avenue gave the thrill of an exploit to the tame
business of ball-going. Who would have imagined, Woburn mused, that such a
situation as his would possess the priceless quality of sharpening the
blunt edge of habit?

It was certainly curious to reflect, as he leaned against the doorway of
Mrs. Gildermere's ball-room, enveloped in the warm atmosphere of the
accustomed, that twenty-four hours later the people brushing by him with
looks of friendly recognition would start at the thought of having seen
him and slur over the recollection of having taken his hand!

And the girl he had gone there to see: what would she think of him? He
knew well enough that her trenchant classifications of life admitted no
overlapping of good and evil, made no allowance for that incalculable
interplay