On Monday she and Nicholas dined very early at one, picked up Mrs. Ellet at the exclusive boarding-house where the lady resided when she visited the city, continued up Broadway, crossed the Harlem River, and arrived at last upon the Kingsbridge Road. The day was exceedingly hot, typical of this summer of 1846, which was to be the hottest that New York remembered. Inside the closed brougham it was oppressive and made Miranda feel languid; she and Mrs. Ellet both used surreptitious handkerchiefs to remove tiny beads of perspiration from their upper lips. But Nicholas, who seemed impervious to temperature, was cool as usual while he questioned their guest on the various recent accomplishments of 'the starry sistethood,' as the feminine literati, Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt, Margaret Fuller, Mrs. Osgood, and Anna Lynch, had come to be known to the irreverent. Eliza Ellet considered herself a whole blazing constellation amongst the starry sisterhood and was delighted to tell him of the salon's brilliance, even more delighted to recite little snatches of transcendental verse which she had herself indited 'in that hushed hour between midnight and dawn when Morpheus' sable hands touch the rosy finger tips of Aurora and even the fairies are slumbering on their flowery couches,' said Mrs.
