Then his friends and acquaintances ceased to whisper or to think of his
affairs. With all New York's bad points--and they are as plentiful as her
church spires and charity bazaars--she has one offsetting virtue. If a
dweller in her midst chooses to let New York alone, New York is willing to
reciprocate. In her most crowded fashionable districts a person may come
and go for a lifetime, and none in the block in which he dwells will know
when his coming and going ceases. When a New Yorker reads in his newspaper
of the man who lives next door to him, "murdered and his body discovered
by the gas man" or the tax collector, the butcher or the baker, as the
case may be, he never thinks he may have been remiss in his neighbourly
duties. There is no such word as "neighbour" in the New York City
dictionary. It may have been there once, but, if so, it was long
ago used as a stake for the barbed-wire fence of exclusive
keep-your-distance-we-keep-our-distance-until-we-know-youness. It is told
of a minister from the rural districts, an old-fashioned American, who
came to New York to take charge of a parish, that he started out to make
his calls and was seized in the hall of what in civilisation would have
been his next-door neighbour.
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