Greenwich Village, when in funds, dines, lunches, breakfasts at the Parisian. Upper West Side, when seeking the quaintly foreign dissociated from squalor, dines there. Upper West Side always goes up the wide front steps and through the busy little office into the airy eating rooms with full length hinged windows. There is music here; a switchboard youth who giftedly blends slang with argot; even, it has been reported, an interior fountain. Greenwich Village now and again ascends those wide front steps; but more often frequents the basement where is neither fountain nor music, merely chairs, tables and ineffable food; these latter in three or four small rooms which you may enter from the Avenue, directly under the steps, or from the side street through the bar. The corner room, nearest the bar, is a haunt of such newspaper men as live in the neighborhood. Also in the basement is a rather obscure and crooked passage extending from the bar past the small rooms and the barber shop of Marius to the equally obscure and crooked stairway that leads by way of telephone booths and a passage to the little office hallway and the upper restaurant. The whole, apparently, was arranged with the mechanics of French farce uppermost in the mind of the architect. Peter's large horn-rimmed eye-glasses hung by their heavy black ribbon from the frame of the mirror; his long person lay, relaxed, in the chair. His right foot rested on a bent-wire stand; and kneeling respectfully before it, polishing the shoe, was the boy called Theophile. His left hand lay on the soft palm of Miss Maria Tonifetti who was working soothingly, head bowed, on the thumb nail. Miss Tonifetti was pretty. She happens to be the reason why Peter had kept away from the shop of Marius all spring. These Italian girls, from below Washington Square, were known to be of an impetuous temper. Hy Lowe had on several occasions advised Peter to let them alone. Hy believed that they, carried knives. Now, however, finding Maria so subdued, if gloomily emotional, of eye, experiencing again the old soft thrill as her deft smooth fingers touched and pressed his own, he was seriously considering asking her out to dinner. He had first thought of this while Marius (himself) was plying the razor. (What a hand had Marius!) The notion grew during the drowsily comfortable shampoo that came next. With the face massage, and the steaming towels that followed it--one of these now covered his face, with a minute breathing hole above the nose--came a gentle glow of tenderness toward all the world and particularly toward Miss Tonifetti. After all, he had never intended neglecting her. Life is so complex! I had hoped to slip through this narrative with no more than an occasional and casual allusion to Maria. But this, it appears, is not possible. She matters. And even at the risk of a descent into unromantic actuality, into what you might call “realism,” she enters at this point.