Gerhardt was her lieutenant, the moving spirit of her Ragged Edge Club, master of ceremonies of the jolly dinners she used to give, and master of ceremonies at her funeral, where they carried out her last wishes: The same band that had played merry dances for her while alive, played the same merry dances during the burial ceremonies. “The East Side is mournful enough. I have always tried to make them happy. Let them be merry to the tune of gay music while they are burying me,” were her own directions. Gerhardt became her literary executor and her few books, together with bound copies of her magazine always occupy a place of honor in his den. 1918 III. Forty-second Street loses its brilliance on Seventh Avenue and shows all the way down to the West Side ferries the sad degeneration of a New York street that was once a fashionable residence section. Glaring electric signs from Fifth to Seventh Avenues. High life after dusk. Eighteen theaters. Cabarets galore. The amusement center of the metropolis around Broadway. The seat of learning in one whole block on Fifth Avenue. The moment you cross Seventh Avenue, cheap rooming houses, tenement dwellings, sweat shops. Wealth and poverty rub elbows. Puritanical decency on the borders of the city’s mire. Lunch rooms, garages, plumber shops, dirty Jewish and Italian groceries, loan brokers’ offices, everywhere signs “Rooms to Let,” gaudily dressed women emerge from dark house entrances on whose stoops laborers read their evening papers. Children everywhere, ragged, uncared for children. In the midst of this typically American panorama, pinched in between a repair shop and a restaurant, is Mr. Lawson’s book store. He sells books, too, but I would rather call his place of business an “intellectual exchange.” “How can you sell books in this neighborhood?” I asked of Mr. Lawson on my first visit to his shop. I knew him a dozen of years ago in Chicago. He’s a book man of the old school. He knows books, is well read, well known among the members of his guild. Americana had been his specialty and many a scarce and rare item had he discovered in days gone by. “What a strange place you have selected here in New York.” “Stick around for a couple of hours and you will see yourself that book stores of my brand are actually needed in this sort of neighborhood in New York,” was his off-hand answer, while he continued counting green and yellow tickets, assorting them by their colors. “What are they?” I asked.