Kitabı oku: «Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905», sayfa 17
IV
The announcement which Mrs. Gunnison made on the following morning came as a surprise to Miriam. She had some difficulty in not displaying an undue excitement. The habit of containment, which had come with worldly experience, however, did not fail her. She heard her hostess state that Arthur Leeds was coming to stay in the house without any exhibition of visible emotion. Mrs. Gunnison said that, as the Barlows had other people coming, he was going to transfer himself to “Highlands,” and that he would arrive in time for luncheon. Any fears which Miriam experienced were wholly offset by a devout thankfulness. The event offered such an occasion for the carrying out of her plan as she had not hoped to have given her. In the promise of such an admirable opportunity for the execution of her purpose, she found a melancholy satisfaction. If, as she thought to herself, the iron was to enter her soul, the sooner the affair was accomplished the better. The process of self-sacrifice was not pleasant in the execution, however glorious it might appear in the conception. Self-immolation might be a duty, but, as every martyrdom, it was more satisfactory as an ideal than as a fact.
The first opportunity which came to execute what she had laboriously planned was during the aimless inoccupation of after luncheon idleness. The arrangements for the afternoon had not yet been concluded, but were in the careless making. Who should ride; who should drive; who should walk; who should go and who should stay; the what and whither had not been settled: Leeds strolled to her side.
“I have been trying to speak to you, but you have avoided me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why?” he asked; “I am going to tell you the truth, now – ” she paused, and looked at him.
“Why?” he repeated.
“Because I think that you are the most detestable man I ever saw,” she answered, gazing squarely at him.
He started slightly – glanced at her in surprise, and abruptly sat down on the divan beside her.
“You have really come to that conclusion?” he asked.
“I have always believed it,” she answered, firmly.
“But you said – ”
“You told me that I was a flatterer. I shall not be with you any longer. You wish the truth. You shall have it.”
“That is what you thought from the first?” he said, slowly.
“Yes,” she answered, less clearly. “I have always understood that you were most absurdly self-satisfied. That you are deluded by a pose as to which you are so weak as to deceive yourself. That you take yourself with a seriousness which leads you to believe that you are preaching a crusade when you are only blowing a penny whistle. That you assume that you have made for yourself a position and a reputation which were made for you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, quietly.
“You have an old name and a large fortune which rendered you conspicuous and made everything easy. The newspapers have talked of you only as they would anyway. Indeed, they would have given more space to you if you had a liking for conducting an automobile painted like a barber’s pole than they have because you went into politics. They would have preferred the striped automobile, but they had to be content with the ‘reform politics’ as the freak of one in your place.”
“Then you think I am – nothing?”
“You are a rich young man of assured position – spoiled by the world.”
“I thought I had, at least, ordinary common sense.”
“Probably – but still you have unduly lost your head. You would not know if people were laughing at you – ”
Leeds flushed slightly. Miriam caught her breath sharply, and reached forward to take up a fan which lay within her reach.
“I am altogether a monster?”
“No,” she replied, calmly. “A very ordinary young man, I should say.”
“I’d be kind to dumb animals and not kick a baby – ”
“I am quite serious,” she answered. “You objected to any little pleasantness on my part because what I said might not be altogether sincere. Now we are going to have facts. Indeed, you are the type of man I dislike.”
“At least, we know where we are now,” he responded.
“Yes. And as we are staying in the same house it may be as well.”
Miriam rose slowly. She walked decidedly across the room, and ostentatiously placed herself beside Mrs. Gunnison. Leeds, deserted, did not move. He sat staring at the floor, as he softly drummed with his fingers on the couch’s leather arm.
As well as in certain other particulars, the life of a country house is microcosmical in this – escape from the requirements of human relationship is impossible. Indeed, the demands are made greater, the bonds more firmly fixed. In fact, the condition of all may be more fitly described as the condition of two united in matrimony – they take each other for better or worse. Constantly through the day they must meet. The terms on which they are thrown together impose intimacy. If latent antipathy exists with the revealing conditions of constant companionship it must be discovered. If inherent sympathy is to be found the two gravitate toward each other with inevitable certainty. As the birthplace of aversion quickly reaching a maturity of detestation and hate; as the hothouse of interest growing speedily into full bloom of liking and love, there is no place like a country house. All existence there, in its condensed form, is a forcing process. Without any awkwardly abrupt transition or disconnecting jolts, those who begin to talk about mutual friends in the morning may easily reach a discussion of their own souls in the afternoon, and be far on the broad and easy path of sentiment by evening. Like or dislike, more or less strong, must surely and quickly follow. There is in the social chemistry a certainty of repulsion or attraction, out of which the most unexpected combinations result – of a surprisingly lasting nature.
In the daily routine Miriam saw Leeds constantly. Though she might come down late for breakfast, she always found him. Even if she breakfasted in her room, when she descended he was always smoking in the hall.
“I did not expect to stay so long,” he explained to her on one occasion, rising as she paused at the foot of the stairs.
“Then why do you?” she asked, coldly.
“Don’t you know?” he demanded. “Should you feel it pleasanter if I went away?”
“Really – as I have undertaken to be perfectly frank with you – how can your going or staying make the least difference in the world to me?”
“Still,” he said, looking at her curiously, “there must be something tiresome in having to be scorning somebody all the time.”
“I think,” she said, briefly, “I hear voices in the billiard room. I am going in there.”
If at dinner Leeds found himself next to her he discovered that she spoke to him no more than the strict letter of the law governing the conduct of guests in the same house demanded. What she said was of the most indifferent nature. If he sought to reach a more personal basis he found himself checked.
“Miss Whiting,” he said, suddenly, on the third evening, “I am going away to-morrow morning.”
Miriam swung about swiftly.
“To-morrow!” she exclaimed, with a catch in her voice.
“Yes, I think I had better go, though there is something I want to tell you before I do. I have thought of all that you have said. I have profited by the new light that you have thrown upon myself – my actions – my life.”
“What do you mean?” she murmured.
“I have realized that very likely I am a prig. I understand the futility of what I am trying to do. I see that I have been mistaken in my power. I’m going to give up.”
“Give up?” she replied.
“You have shown that I was attempting more than I was able to do. The Donaldsons have asked me to go in their yacht round the world. The Vierna starts on Thursday. I am going away to be lazy and careless, and live the life for which you think I’m fitted.”
“You are going to give up everything?” she exclaimed.
“Yes,” he answered. “It is your doing. You must take the responsibility of it.”
“But what I say – what I think, can make no difference,” she almost entreated. “I am not of enough importance to you – you cannot consider me enough – ”
“All that is something of which you know nothing,” he answered, gravely. “Something of which I have told you nothing. I am going away – with the Donaldsons.”
“People like that!” she interrupted.
“People like that. I am going with them to lead their life – to be gone for a year, unless one thing happens. As I said, you are responsible.”
“But I can’t be,” she implored. “It isn’t possible. I can’t count for anything.”
“Let me assure you that you do.”
“Then I can’t take the responsibility. I won’t.”
“Unless one thing happens I am going,” he went on, inflexibly. “There are some, I think, who believe in me – who will think I am making a mistake.”
“But your future – your career,” she began, and paused abashed, as she saw the way he watched her.
“I thought we were to have no – insincerities – no flatteries. Since I know what you really think, such civil implications can mean nothing.”
She bit her lips, pale as her cheeks were white.
“Oh!” she cried, “how horrible!”
Through all of dinner she hardly spoke. If she said nothing to Leeds, neither would she address the man on her other side, only giving such monosyllable answers as were necessary. The evening dragged slowly. Leeds did not approach her. Once or twice she looked toward him, but he did not appear to notice her. Indeed, he only came late from the smoking room and returned after a brief appearance in the big hall.
“When,” she asked once, in a timid voice, of Mrs. Gunnison, “does Mr. Leeds go?”
“The early train,” the lady answered. “I believe he leaves the house before seven, or at some equally unearthly hour.”
The fresh sunlight of the early morning was flooding through the open hall door as Leeds came down the wide, main stairs. He saw, under the porte-cochère, the trap ready to take him to the station, and into which the second man, with the help of the groom, was lifting his trunk. Here and there a housemaid was busy with duster and cloth. The machinery of the establishment was being set in running condition, and there was the accompanying disorder. The place seemed strange and unfamiliar.
“Your keys, sir,” the butler said, holding out the bunch.
“Yes,” he answered, “I’m ready.”
As he spoke he started. Clearly in the stillness of the morning he heard a few soft notes struck on the piano. At that hour the sound was most unusual. He listened. The Flower Music of “Parsifal.” With a swiftness that left the astonished butler staring after him, he darted toward a door. In a moment he had torn the portière aside and had crossed the polished floor of the music room. Miriam was seated at the piano, her fingers resting on the keys.
“You are down!” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she answered, neither turning round nor looking up.
“You are very early.”
“Yes,” she assented. Then she whirled about on the music stool. “I came down to see you.”
“Why?”
Both spoke with a simple directness – with the manner of those dealing in ultimate moments with the unmistakable facts.
“You told me last night that you were doing as you do because of what I have said. I cannot take the responsibility. I’d rather that you thought even worse of me than you do. Oh!” she cried, bending her head down on her hands, which clasped the rack of the piano. “I am, false – false! I cannot be true even in my falsity. All that I have been telling you is not the truth.”
“Yes?” he interrupted, eagerly.
“When you judged me – when you told me – or showed me what you thought of me – I recognized what I was doing – what I was. I saw I was false. My pride drove me to do something else. It was a punishment for myself – a price I must pay. As falsely as you thought I tried to please you – as falsely, really, I made myself hateful to you. I told you every untrue, miserable thing of which I could think. It seems as if any little remnant of dignity which I had demanded it. But to have you say that you were influenced by my lies – were going to give up so much that was splendid and great – because of them! Oh, you must believe me now. I could not bear it.”
“Then you don’t think I am altogether contemptible?”
“I think you are the finest and best and strongest man I know,” she said, bravely.
On one knee, beside her, he had his arm about her.
“Bless you, darling,” he cried. “Then I can tell the truth, too. I think that you are the dearest and sweetest woman, and I love you – love you!”
“I – I don’t deserve it,” she sobbed.
“I would not,” he said, “let myself believe what you told me at first, but then I would not let myself believe what you said afterward. I hoped – ”
“Oh, it was so hard for me. Can’t you understand? There was expiation in it. Don’t you think it enough?”
“I think we have both been mistaken and unhappy.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Since the first I have changed. It taught me a lesson. I am different – really.”
“We’ll have everything all right now, and that is all.”
“But you are going away,” she exclaimed.
“I said I was going away unless one thing happened.”
“Yes,” she said, eagerly.
“Very well – it has happened.”
The sound of the brush striking sharply and with metallic distinctness on a dustpan came from the room beyond.
“Perhaps we had better go on the terrace,” he laughed. “Really, you know, we ought to have moonlight and mystery, but – ”
Together they went out through the open door into the fresh, soft morning air. The warm scent of the garden blew up to them. A large, yellow butterfly fluttered peacefully by. The dew still lay on leaf and flower, glittering in a thousand sparkles.
“The night is the time for romance,” he said. “Any well managed proposal should be made under the stars.”
“But the morning, such a morning,” she exclaimed, softly, and clasping her hands in ecstasy. “And as this is going to be a beginning for me, I like the morning better.”
THE MIRACLE OF DAWN
By Madison Cawein
What it would mean for you and me
If dawn should come no more!
Think of its gold along the sea,
Its rose above the shore!
That rose of awful mystery,
Our souls bow down before.
What wonder that the Inca kneeled,
The Aztec prayed and pled
And sacrificed to it, and sealed,
With rites that long are dead,
The marvels that it once revealed
To them it comforted!
What wonder, yea! what awe, behold!
What rapture and what tears
Were ours, if wild its rivered gold —
That now each day appears —
Burst on the world, in darkness rolled,
Once every thousand years!
Think what it means to me and you
To see it even as God
Evolved it when the world was new!
When Light rose, earthquake shod,
And slow its gradual splendor grew
O’er deeps the whirlwind trod.
What shoutings then and cymbalings
Arose from depth and height!
What worship-solemn trumpetings,
And thunders, burning white,
Of winds and waves, and anthemings
Of Earth received the Light!
Think what it means to see the dawn!
The dawn, that comes each day!
What if the East should ne’er grow wan,
Should never more grow gray!
That line of rose no more be drawn
Above the ocean’s spray!
THE SONG OF BROADWAY
By Robert Stewart
A certain club of good fellows of both sexes, journalists, authors, illustrators, actors, men of pleasure, and Bohemians generally, used to gather on Sunday evenings, a merry decade ago, round the hospitable table of an Italian lady who had acquired her culinary accomplishments under the distinguished eye of M. Martin – late chef to M. de Lesseps, and present proprietor of Martin’s Restaurant – before she attempted to practice on her own account, so to speak, in the basement of a dingy brick house in West Twelfth Street.
Signora Maria was a trusting soul in those days, and many a hungry poor devil has hung up his hat, coat and dinner there, and blessed his kind hostess as he quaffed her red ink. We didn’t say claret; we called out: “Where’s my red ink bottle, Maria?” And Maria would put down the soup tureen she was going from table to table with, and fetch us a pint of her ordinaire. It was sour stuff certainly, which even Maria’s radiant smile couldn’t sweeten, but budding genius is careless of the morrow, and on Sunday evenings, especially, when Maria held her salon in the boarded back room, built out over the yard, vast quantities of it were gayly consumed, along with cigarettes, and coffee, and flaming pousse-cafés.
In one sense, at least, our function was appropriate to the night. Everybody “came prepared” – women and men both – like a country Experience Meeting. Jokes cracked like lightning through the tobacco clouds; songs of love and war trembled and roared above our heads; humor and pathos, those twin slaves of the lamp, sported and wept at our bidding; in a word, no end of youthful bombast, and kind laughter, and harmless, gratified vanity, was exhibited there. It was really more like a Montmartre cabaret than any place I ever saw in New York. Only, with humblest apologies for disparaging their worldliness, the ladies were so evidently good, sincere, faithful friends, wives, mothers, sweethearts, that some of us watched their happy gayety with grateful, pleased eyes.
A Judas came to that kindly board, and betrayed to a newspaper these merry, honest folk at their simple feast. Stupid, prosperous commercial persons pushed their way in and stared at them. They fled away, scared at last, to more inaccessible haunts.
But on one particularly jolly evening, to return to a text memories of tried friends and happy hours have beguiled me from, among a number of notable guests one who “favored,” Mr. Wilton Lackaye, then appearing as that white-eyed, hairy, awful Svengali everybody so loathed and applauded, dramatically recited a remarkable and original poem called the “Song of Broadway.” Many a time since have I remembered the scene, the song, the company; the long, wine-stained tables, the eddying cigarette smoke, the acute, lively faces. In one way or another, everyone there was a trained observer, and knew his Broadway.
It is rather a bold thing to say you know your Broadway. As I, too, sing my song about it, if I sound a note once or twice you have never heard, oh, thank Heaven, and turn away! With us, I trust, it will be but a minor chord. So every stroller there recognized the world he lives in, and the child, the mother, the cabby, gambler, pickpocket, doctor, parson, each carries off his or her own bundle of impressions.
Leaving it, then, to graver historians to trace the financial, commercial and social evolution of this tremendous street, which was a forest trail once, within whose sylvan solitudes red men roamed and wild beasts prowled, let us from our humble station, as men of the world and social philosophers, describe merely that stretch of it which begins at Madison Square and ends at Forty-fifth Street; where it is high noon at eight o’clock at night, and bedtime when the gray dawn comes shivering cold and ghastly into hotel corridors where the washerwomen are scrubbing the marble floors. “Little old Broadway,” as it is affectionately toasted in the vernacular of its habitués, wherever rye whisky is drunk, and faithful homesick hearts recall its lights, its pleasures and its crowds.
Broadway, I say, at eight o’clock at night, is the most fascinating street on earth. It is en fête every evening; and you have only to walk that mile often enough, and the whole town will display itself at leisure and at its ease, perfectly unconscious and natural and selfish. It is not the lights; it is not the brilliant hotels, and theaters, and restaurants, and shops, and tramcars, and hurrying cabs; it is not the music that floats out to you on the rippling surface of the town’s deep voice; it is not that voice itself, vibrating as it is with every emotion of the human heart, of pleasure, excitement, careless gayety, shame that has ceased to care, lust whispering its appeal, modesty’s shocked sigh, innocence’s happy prattle, kind laughter, friendly chat, unexpected hearty greetings; it is the vast, shifting, jostling, loitering, idle crowd, the multitude of a huge cosmopolitan city that is the spectacle, and that to a man who knows his town is more dramatic, and humorous, and pathetic, and fascinating than all the plays to which young ladies, and their papas, too, are hurrying, to thrill, and laugh, and cry over.
Think of a mile of street, brilliant like a drawing room almost, and swarming with all kinds of men and women from all over the world, each seeking his or her particular amusement and finding it. Pleasure is the commodity on sale here, and one can obtain it at any of those glittering signs blazing out over the crush, or traffic in it with the venders of the pavement.
Isn’t it marvelous? Isn’t it wonderful? as the conjurer says when he cuts your watch out of an onion. Mr. Conjurer returns your watch in safety, but it retains that delicate perfume which only the time it chronicles can wear away. Many an ingenious traveler has stepped out of his hotel to watch this magic spectacle for a little, and brought back with him bitter remembrances that all the tears shed secretly won’t ever wash out.
Tant pis! You are not a preacher, monsieur. There is only one church on your Broadway, and that is dark and shut and sold to a syndicate. The only religion one gets here is the Bibles in the hotel bedrooms, and at Jerry McAuley’s Cremorne Mission, round the corner in Thirty-second Street. What, then? Nobody claims Broadway to be a domestic scene, and children and nursemaids don’t constitute its charm.
Look north, from where we have turned into it, after lighting our cigars at Van Valkenburg’s, under the Albemarle Hotel, and those dazzling signs will tell you what most people come here for: Martin’s, Weber’s Music Hall, the Imperial Hotel, the Knickerbocker Theater, with Mr. Sothern in “Hamlet,” Hoster’s, Kid McCoy’s Café, Brown’s Chop House, Grand Opera, Rector’s Restaurant – to dine, to drink, to smoke, to stroll, to see the play, to watch each other. Did you ever see so much light, so much life? Halt where sedate business halts, too, at the St. James Building, frowning darkly down on gay, hoydenish Martin’s, whose roguish, Parisian eyes twinkle mischievously up at it, as if they know the tall, somber old hypocrite has a score of wicked theatrical agencies hidden away in its locked heart, and just see!
Straight ahead of you, within ten minutes’ brisk walk, are twenty theaters, sixteen hotels, six expensive restaurants, two huge department stores, the Herald newspaper palace, with the elevated road cutting across its face, several tall apartment houses thrusting up their lighted windows into the night, telegraph offices, bars, apothecaries, florists, confectioners, tobacconists, jewelry shops galore, all signed with electricity, and producing that wonderful glitter and glare that is both so bizarre and so enchanting. A street, do we call this? It is a scene, most theatrical and gorgeous, and set for the great human comedy which is even now being displayed upon it.
In this theater you perceive audience and actor alike occupy the stage, as they used to do in the old London playhouses; and poor little flower girls are pushing their way through our throng, also offering the roses that fade so fast after they are plucked. Anything makes an interest, an excitement; a fire engine tearing across Thirty-sixth Street, a policeman marching a thief to the precinct house, an ambulance clanging down Sixth Avenue, a newsboy asleep on the Dime Savings Bank steps, the bronze hammers striking nine on the Herald clock, a Corean embassy driving up to Wallack’s Theater in their soft felt hats and gorgeous robes.
Never were a lot of people more easy to be amused, more eager to laugh or sympathize. A gentleman’s hat blows up in the air; hoots of laughter explode after it. It rolls under an express van; a dozen citizens spring to its rescue. Nerves are on edge. Stimulants are exciting keen brains. It is a trifle savage, this crowd. Look! See them hustle that masher! His hat’s smashed already. The poor child he was persecuting is crying with fright. A woman, not given to such a pure embrace, has her arm about her; a big “plain-clothes man” is drying her eyes with his handkerchief; a couple of young stock brokers are bargaining with cabby on his box to drive her home. Ah, that is a pretty sight! I think Mr. Addison would have liked to see it, and Dick Steele, I know, would have slipped a bank note into her hand. Oh, burst of sunshine in the darkness! Oh, chivalry and kindness beaming out on fast Broadway! Oh, reckless, hardened sinners loving innocence and kneeling to it!
But come; this is still Broadway. A block off they know nothing of all this. Above us Daly’s is closing and its fashionable audience pouring out on the pavement. In Twenty-ninth Street, the Cairo, the Alhambra, the Bohemia, are just as brilliant and fascinating as usual.
I remember, one evening, as I was passing the ladies’ entrance to the Gilsey House, on my way home from the club, out comes a visiting family party —monsieur et madame et sa fille. Monsieur stops, buttoning up that “good frock coat,” the uniform of the American senator, which has proclaimed Squedunk through every capital in Europe. He stands, the oracle of the post office, the rich man of the county, the benignant elder of the Congregational church, gazing across the way at all the flaring signs toward Sixth Avenue.
“Ah,” says he, smiling reminiscently, “the Midway. Let’s go and look at ’em, my dears.”
I had a wicked impulse to go, too, and see what happened. But I repressed it, and took the liberty to inform Mr. Smallville that those places were not especially recommended for ladies. I think miss was mortally offended with me for upsetting the program.
Are other people secretly disappointed, too, because they can’t get a peep behind those closed doors? It was Madam Eve, I believe, who first tasted the apple; it was Pandora who lifted the lid of the box of troubles; propose a slumming party, and be sure it is the ladies who will applaud loudest. Well, then – those places, dear Miss Smallville are – very much like the zenanas the foreign missionaryess told you about last autumn in the church parlors. Now you know all about it. Ask your brother Tom if I’m not correct. I wager he can tell you if he chooses.
It is a curious fact, by the way, that all the places which make Broadway notorious are in the side streets. Just as it is a curious misnomer to call the toughest section of it the Tenderloin. Broadway has no slums. Laboring people, even, never make any distinguishable element in its populace. This is, of course, owing to its geographical position. But there is one fact which is immensely to its credit, and is perhaps due to the Irish who govern it, if they do prefer Fifth Avenue to parade in. For when Brian Boru – from whom every loyal Irishman is descended – was king, didn’t a beauteous damsel, with a ring of price, stroll unprotected and in safety over his kingdom? Beauteous damsels with rings of price certainly stroll unprotected over Broadway, but this is not the fact I emphasize. It is, seriously, that it is quite possible for young ladies to walk this fastest mile in the United States, with their papas and mammas, every evening, and write home to Kate that “it is just like Saturday night on Main Street, only bigger.” No sensible girl could promenade the Strand or the Bois after theater hours, no matter how chaperoned, and then make such a comparison. Huzza! I say. Huzza! It is America’s compliment to her women.
Still, however decorously Broadway subdues its hilarity before the ladies, like a fast young man at a tea party, we all know it is not in the least like Saturday night on Main Street. Let us saunter along, like two men of the world, perfectly competent to recognize vice, but infinitely preferring to smile at honest gayety, and find out what this crowd really is that is again packing the pavement as the theaters turn out their audiences.
Principally, so much in the majority as to characterize it, men of affairs, country merchants, out-of-town visitors, with and without their womenkind, the New York audience to whom actor and clergyman alike make their appeal; while circling about in it, embroidered so to speak on its surface, is that other crowd – high fashion, artists, actors, distinguished visitors, wardmen, Bohemians, sporting people, thieves and confidence men – which also produces its effect, and lends its coloring and vivacity to the picture. The side streets, looking east at least, are respectable, but they are not brilliant. Fashion, Bohemia and fast life are, after all, what we have come to watch. And as fashion mostly cuts Broadway – where it used to live and promenade when Mr. N. P. Willis’ natty boots pattered about Fourteenth Street – at the first crossing, it is Bohemia and the “wise push” we will sup with.
In Broadway parlance, Bohemia means newspaper and theatrical people. And I venture to remind the ladies and gentlemen of the drama in presenting them in such a company, that I am painting a city nocturne, and may properly introduce Mr. Morgan, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, Father Ducey, dear man, in his cape overcoat, Al Smith leaning against the Gilsey House railing, or any other characteristic and familiar figure natural to the composition. No picture of Broadway would be complete, they will acknowledge, without them, and to use a metaphor I have before employed, they are certainly accustomed to occupy “the center of the stage” with dignity and elegance.
Anyway, they all come here, and I should think they would all love it. This part of Broadway is nicknamed the Rialto. Nowhere else are they taken so cordially and frankly by the hand. They lounge about it by day and win fame and fortune in its theaters at night. Nat Goodwin and his wife, Hackett and Mary Mannering – when they can meet – Sir Henry Irving, De Wolf Hopper, Miss Annie Russell, bowing to Charles Richman out of a cab, Amelia Bingham, Joseph Jefferson, whose only fault is that he isn’t immortal, and funny, rollicking Fay Templeton, humming a new coon song – old favorites and new ones, you may see them going to supper at the Lambs’ Club, the Players, the Waldorf, Delmonico’s, Sherry’s, any evening they are in town.
