Tea for you is being served in a large mausoleum of a white hotel--excessively white from a profuse use of porcelain tiles which can be washed occasionally--of most extraordinary architecture. Some day some one is going to attempt an analysis of hotel architecture in New York and elsewhere in the U.S.A. but this is not the time and place. Suffice it to say here and now that you finally found a door entering the white porcelain mausoleum. What a feast awaited your eyes--as well as your stomach--within. Rooms of rose pink and rooms of silver gray, Persian rooms, Japanese rooms, French rooms in the several varieties of Louis, Greek rooms--Europe, the ancients and the Orient, have been ransacked for the furnishing of this tavern. And in the center of them all is a great glass-enclosed garden, filled with giant palms and tiny tables, tremendous waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced employé--who is a sort of sublimated edition of the narrow lean hat-boys who we shall find in the eating places of the Broadway theater districts--divests you of your outer wraps. You elbow past a band and arrive at the winter garden. A head waiter in an instant glance of steel-blue eyes decides that you are fit and finds the tiniest of the tiny tables for you. It is so far in the shade of the sheltering palm that you have to bend almost double to drink your tea--and the orchestra is rather uncomfortably near. [Illustration: Washington Square and its lovely Arch--New York] Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispensaries--an unusual place in a converted stable in Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft in West Twenty-eighth--dozens of little shops, generally feminine to an intensified degree, which combine the serving of tea with the vending of their wares. But she preferred the big white hotel. "Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so restful," she says, as you dodge to permit two ladies--one in gray silk and the other in a cut of blue cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog--to slip past you without knocking your tea out of your untrained fingers. "We might have gone to the Manhattan--but it's so filled with young girls and the chappies from the schools--the Ritz is proper but dull, so is Sherry's--all the rest more or less impossible." She rattles on--the matter of restaurants is always dear to the New York heart. You ignore the details. "But why?" you demand. "Why what?" she returns. "Why tea?" You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair--London--in a sort of climatic necessity. The prevalence of fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup of hot tea a real bracer--a stimulant that carries the human through another two or three hours of hard existence until the late London dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New York--with more clear days than any other metropolitan city in the world--does not need tea. You say so frankly.