The men's faces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women's were pretty and knowing, and yet dull.

It was, probably, the holiday expression of the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather than books.
Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have been as common-minded as they looked.

"But," March said, "I understand now why the poor people don't come up here and live in this clean, handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death.
On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself." In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so long ago.

They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect.
They recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed that covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a breath of air after a sleepless night.

Now the paupers were gone, and where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-work for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no name.