All plebeian Chelsea was abroad, and a bourgeois population is nowhere unneighborly.

Women shapeless with bundles, their hats awry over thin, eager faces, gathered in knots on the edge of the curb, boasting of their bargains.

Little girls in curlpapers and little boys in brimless hats clung to their skirts, whining for pennies, only to be silenced by absent-minded cuffs.

A few disconsolate fathers strayed behind these family groups, the rest being distributed between the barber shops and the corner lamp-posts.
I understood these people, being one of them, and I liked them, and I found it all delightfully sociable.
Saturday night is the workman's wife's night, but that does not entirely prevent my lady from going abroad, if only to leave an order at the florist's.

So it happened that Bellingham Hill and Washington Avenue, the aristocratic sections of Chelsea, mingled with Arlington Street on Broadway, to the further enhancement of my enjoyment of the occasion.