In the same week the plutocrats and artists held an Alley Festa for the Red Cross. At a cost of $10,000 they turned the stables of MacDougal Alley into a replica of an Italian street, draped it with much color, daubed it with much paint, hung it with many lights. I hope there were pluts there; the artists we saw were not artists. You can easily pick out the pluts: they look like figures from the wax-works; but the “artists” looked like Greenwich Village. It was a bastard performance, a bastard street, a bastard hilarity, bastard plutocrats and bastard artists, with bastard soldiers guarding the scene. Between the acts they all congregated in the Brevoort to have drinks. The pluts foregathered,—women in up-town clothes, looking like Mrs. Potter Palmer, with grey marcelled hair and broad stiff black hats, holding the hands and looking neurotically into the eyes of young men who resembled bank clerks. Groups of artists came in, costumed like people fleeing from a fire. I believe they thought they were Neopolitans or something. They all settled clamourously at one table and fell amourously upon each other’s necks. There was nothing personal, nothing unique, nothing imaginative about any of their costumes. One woman sat in the embrasure of a man’s arm, sharing his chair with him. She had short hempy hair, she was dressed in street-gamin clothes, she was at least forty, and her cheek bones were on a line with her nostrils. No human head should be made that way; it’s intolerable except in fish, frogs, or snakes. The greatest American dancer came in, followed by a little girl and a train of men—_bummel-zug dritte classe_. She had draped about her a green plush toga, thrown over her shoulder in a fat knot—not apple green, nor emerald green, nor sap green, but a green and texture sacred to railroads. The only other perfect example I have seen of that color and texture was on the great chairs in the station at Mons. She was too-young-looking—a type much admired in my childhood when China dolls lived, with painted China hair undulating above pink and white China faces. When she looked up in conversation her profile made almost a flat line, the chin retiring into the neck as if it had no opinions on the subject, the eyes rolling up but no expression of the face moving up with them. Oh beautiful people, oh beautiful fête! The music and lights drew the children out of the slums back of Washington Square: fathers holding babies in their arms, and strings of little children trimming the edges of the sidewalks at a respectful distance around the back entrance, were pushed in the face and told to get out, to move on, by policemen and some more rough fellows in khaki—because ... this was a fête for humanity. And it’s all right, this game of push-face: every one plays it. When you’re little children you play it and call it push-face; nations call it government; the “people” are playing it now in Russia and call it revolution.