All this, which may be purely irrelevant matter, has grown out of a visit paid by some of the characters in this narration, to a fashionable restaurant and saloon on Broadway, and the belief that in some of those houses temptation is lurking in so insidious and deadly a form that they are doing a thousand times the injury inflicted by the acknowledged haunts of vice. Special allusion may or may not be made to the gorgeous but tawdry room in which the three sat down to discuss their _a la mode_ beef, coffee and biscuits. Any one of the fashionable houses to which ladies habitually resort without male protection, for a noonday lunch when shopping,--may serve as a type of all the rest; and not one of them but may be passed with a shudder, by husbands who wish their wives to remain like Cesar's, not only chaste but above suspicion,--and by fathers who do not desire the peach-bloom too early rubbed off from the innocence of their fair daughters. At this marble table, where the cloth is being so carefully spread by the white-napkined waiter who has a steaming cluster of dishes on a salver on the table opposite,--there may be a little party, like that of our three friends, dropped in on the most proper of errands--that of merely procuring a bit of lunch in the midst of a day of business, without going home for it or visiting the table d'hote at a hotel; but at the next table and the next there is something different. Here sit a party of three giddy girls, without male protection, innocent enough in their lives and intentions, but boldly exposing their faces to the rude gaze of any of the libertine diners-out who may happen to be at the tables opposite, and returning that gaze, when met, with a smile and a simper that merely means scorn and self-confidence but may be easily construed into a less creditable expression. And at this table, only two removed, discussing a _pate de foix gras_ which may or may not have come from Strasburg of the Big Goose Livers, and washing down his edibles with a glass of liqueur that fires the blood like so much molten lava,--sits a boldfaced man, fashionable in dress and perfumed in hair and whiskers, whose gaze is that of the evil eye upon the reputation of any woman, and who has no better occupation than lounging in any place of public resort, to spy out the beauties of female face and figure and the weaknesses in the fortifications that surround female virtue. And here--at one of the opposite row of tables, her cup of coffee and plate of French trifles in pasty just being set down before her--here is a sadder spectacle than either. The wife of a wealthy merchant, yet young, beautiful and attractive, but with a frightened look in her dark eye and a nervous glancing round at the door every time it opens, which too well reveals her story to the close observer. She is waiting for her _lover_--harsh word in that connection, but the true and only one; her