Moore had taken apartments at the beginning of the year after his grandmother’s death. As we moved from one circle of arc light to another under the street-lamps that ran up Third, passing by simple three- and four-story buildings and under the occasional sidewalk-wide awning of a grocery or vegetable stand, Miss Howard locked her arms into Cyrus’s right and my left and began to comment on the little bits of night activity that we saw along the way, plainly trying to control her excitement by talking of nothing in particular. Cyrus and I said little in reply, and before we knew it we’d turned onto Twentieth Street and reached the brownstone mass of Number 34 Gramercy Park, the square bay and turret windows of a few of its apartments still aglow with gas and electric light. It was one of the oldest apartment houses in the city, and also one of the first of the kind they called “cooperative,” meaning that all the tenants shared ownership. After his grandmother’s sudden death, Mr. Moore’d given some thought to moving into one of the fashionable apartment houses uptown, the Dakota or such, but in the end I don’t think he could face moving so far away from the neighborhoods of his youth. Having lost the second of the only two members of his family he’d ever been close to (the other, his brother, had fallen off a boat after jabbing himself full of morphine and drinking himself senseless many years earlier), Mr. Moore had tried hard to keep ownership of his grandmother’s house on Washington Square, but her will had stated that the place had to be sold and the proceeds divided up among her squabbling blue-blood heirs. Being suddenly and completely on his own in such a deep way was confusing enough for Mr. Moore without venturing into unknown neighborhoods: in the end, he came back to Gramercy Park, to the area where he’d grown up and where he’d learned his first lessons about the seamier side of life while slumming as a teenager over in the Gashouse District to the east.