Strangers used to leisurely appraisals upon their own
thoroughfares are apt to believe that Fifth Avenue notices
nothing; but they are mistaken; it is New York that is
preoccupied, not Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue eye, like a
policeman's, familiar with a variety of types, catalogues you
and replaces you upon the shelf with such automatic rapidity
that you are not aware you have been taken down. Fifth Avenue
is secretly populous with observers who take note of
everything. Of course, among these peregrinate great numbers almost in a
stupor so far as what is closest around them is concerned; and
there are those, too, who are so completely busied with either
the consciousness of being noticed, or the hope of being
noticed, or the hatred of it, that they take note of nothing
else. Fifth Avenue expressions are a filling meal for the
prowling lonely joker; but what will most satisfy his cannibal
appetite is the passage of the self-conscious men and women.
For here, on a good day, he cannot fail to relish some extreme
cases of their whimsical disease: fledgling young men making
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