"After a while the crabs came, and then we eat them--how good. Was it any wonder that so many come here to eat, and drink 'Hiedsick?' And then the rooms were so quiet. Still, the partitions are very thin, for I overheard a woman in the next room say to a gentleman, 'now quit that, or I will tell my husband. You had better not do that again.' And then I heard a little scuffle, and then she said, 'Are you not ashamed of yourself?'"
Why was she not ashamed of herself? She would have been "mortified to death" to have her husband know that she was in that room, eating late suppers and drinking wine, at least, once a week. No wonder she wore a thick veil. She was yet a little ashamed, for fashion's sake, ashamed to be seen going into a private room, at ten o'clock, at night, with a _cavalier servante_. She is on a quick voyage to a shameless harbor, and will soon arrive there--perhaps, just such a harbor as the home of Elsie Morgan, where the rats harbored with her in the same cellar; or the home of little Katy, and her mother in Cow Bay. She would have been ashamed to have her husband know, that under pretence of going to visit a sick friend, she had come with _a friend_ to sup in a "private room," in a "fashionable eating-house." So, too, would that husband have been ashamed to have his wife know, that under pretence of going to call on an old friend at the hotel, he was actually, at that moment, enjoying himself with that friend in the next room, and that that friend was a friend of his wife, too--the fashionable Mrs. Smith, whose husband is in California, toiling to earn money, which he remits to her, which she is using to procure a divorce from him, that she may marry a man she is already playing the harlot with, and whom she will fool in the same way she does her present poor simpleton of a husband. In fact, she is already fooling her paramour, for she is here with another man; and that man is the husband of a lady, whom she addresses as her "dear friend." Ah, well! _C'est la vie_ in New York.
"So we sat and talked, and eat and drank, a long time, for time went merrily on, and at last he poured out the last of the good bottle, and we were just going to drink it and go, for I said, 'I must go home, I have a good mile to go yet,' and he said, 'Oh, I will see you safe home.' So as I was lifting the glass, he caught my arm, and said, 'Stop, there is a fly in it;' and he took my glass and began to look about for something to take the fly out.