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quite grown and I was envious of their added years. They must know so much more about things than I did!
    At first, I only glanced in their direction. Then I noticed they gave up their seats on the bench, and the boy pulled the girl down beside him on the cool shaded grass. They sat there for a few moments. Suddenly, the boy put his arms about the girl and pulled her into his embrace and down beside him on the ground. I watched—fascinated. He leaned over and kissed her. He drew her face and held it with both hands, close to his own. They lay there oblivious to everything, clasped in each others’ arms.
    His gesture—when he drew her toward him and in a sort of masterful way held her—did something to me. My breath came in little gasps. Something stirred within me that made me feel first hot and then cold. I shivered and a little chill ran up and down and all over me. 7

    Blanche desperately “wanted to go home and tell Mother about having watched that boy making love to that girl.” She wanted “to ask her why I felt so funny; why it affected me so.” But she knew that she couldn’t. Her mother—whose “outlook on life reflected the Puritan attitudes of her time”—would have been “horrified.” Beyond cautioning her daughters that they must be “ever on their guard” against the coarse familiarities of men, Mrs. Chesebrough had never spoken a word about sex.
    And so Blanche was left in confusion. She had no way of defining the erotic sensations that had been awakened in her. She knew, however, that something had changed forever. On that summer day in Boston, shivering with pleasure at the sight of the young couple embracing on the grass, “my childhood days ended.” 8

8
    A fter staying with Isia for slightly more than a year, Blanche moved back in with her parents, who had taken a modest apartment in Boston. The cramped flat off Boylston Street—so small, Blanche later wrote, that “there was barely enough space for the piano and ourselves” 1 —took some getting used to after the luxury of her sister’s Longwood mansion. Boston, however, like every place else she had ever lived, would prove to be only a way station.
    Within months of his arrival, her father—bowing to what Blanche called his “irrepressible impulse to travel”—ordered his family to pack up their belongings yet again. This time they were going to New York City, where, so he assured them, he was absolutely certain to strike it rich with his latest invention. Though Isia offered to take Blanche back in and continue her musical studies, James wouldn’t hear of it. A few weeks later, Blanche and her parents, along with her little sister, Lois, were settled in a small apartment on East Twenty-third Street, near Gramercy Park.
    Despite the modesty of their living quarters, Blanche was delighted to find herself in “that great center of metropolitan life.” In her memoirs, she describes, in a tone of breathless excitement, the thrill of those early days in New York City, as she wandered the surging streets, taking in the sights: “the splendid shops, the hotels, the restaurants and theatres.”
    Broadway offered a particularly dazzling spectacle with its endless procession of fashionable couples, the men with their “flawless top-coats, high-hats, and silver-headed walking sticks,” walking arm in arm with their female companions, who were likewise arrayed in the “very best hats, shoes and gloves.” Every block was a bazaar, lined with alluring shops—jewelers, florists, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners. “Pompous doormen in immense coats, shiny brass belts and buttons” posed in the doorways, while liveried coachmen in “tan boots, white tights, blue jackets, waited obsequiously for the mistresses of carriages who were shopping inside.” 2
    At dusk, the electric “fire signs” of the “Great White Way” blazed to life. Hansom cabs drew up beneath the brilliant marquee lights, disgorging laughing, chattering