Upstairs, at bedtime, now in Rachel's room, now in Hagar's the two talked together. Daytime, they looked for Hagar's apartment. They found it at last, high in air, overlooking the great city; roofs and roofs and roofs at a hundred levels; curling streamers of white steam like tossed plumes against the blue sky, bright pennants floating from towering hotel or department store; a clock below a church spire, with a gilt weather-cock far above; blurs of occasional trees seen in some hollow opening; streets far below them, crossing, crossing--percolating rivulets of manikins that were people; roofs and roofs and roofs, and a low perpetual, multitudinous voice; and the sky over all, high and clear and exhilarating the day they found the place. "I am going to utter a bromide," said Hagar. "How marvellous is modern life!"
They went over it again. "Thomasine's room, and a guest-room, and my room, and a fine room for Mary Magazine who is coming--Isham having remarried--to look after us, and two baths and a great big library-study-drawing-room, and a little room for what we please, and plenty of closets, and a quiet and good café away up on the roof--Rachel, it's fine!" They sat on a window-seat and Rachel produced a pencil and notebook, and together they tinted the walls and laid rugs and hung pictures and ran bookshelves around and furnished the apartment. "There! that's quiet and perfect and not expensive. As Thomson would say, 'It's quite _comme il faut_, Miss!'"
"Mr. Greer, the artist, has taken him over. He wrote me that he was making thousands, throwing the light on millionaires, and especially millionairesses, and that he wanted Thomson, oh, so badly! He's the type that Thomson likes, and so he joined him two months ago at Newport. Dear old Thomson! Mahomet has gone back to Alexandria."
They looked around the big room. "Soft lights at night and all those twinkling stars out there. It's going to be a dear home."
"You'll have people coming about you. Your own sort--"
Hagar laughed. "What is my sort? Everybody's my sort."
Hagar pondered the mantel-shelf with a view to what should go above it. "I don't know many of them. I know more of them abroad than here. We're a very isolated kind of craftspeople--each of us more or less on a little Robinson Crusoe island of our own. It may be different in New York, I don't know.... We could do a good deal if we'd put our heads together and push the same wheel."