We arose after several hours' reading with a sense of having perused for a space two recent volumes of the Book of Judgment. We were full of emotion. We felt the mystery of the destiny of man. How admirable he is and how pitiful! Throbbing, we went forth into the throbbing city. CHAPTER XV SO VERY THEATRICAL There is a young woman I thought of taking there for luncheon the other day, but when I called for her it did not seem to me that she had used her lip-stick that morning--and so we went somewhere else. She is pretty good-looking and was dressed not at all unfashionably. She would have done all right at the Waldorf, or at the Vanderbilt, or Biltmore, or Ritz-Carlton, or Ambassador. Indeed, I don't know but that at some such place as that I should have been rather proud of her. But, you see, for the place I had in mind her skirt was a little too long--it came almost halfway to her ankles. Her bosom was quite covered. She moves with fair grace, but without striking sinuousness. And I suddenly recollected that she does not smoke much. No; I saved myself just in time; I should have been chagrined, embarrassed, most decidedly uncomfortable; she would have been conspicuous. I should probably have lost caste with the waiters, too; and not again have been able to get a table after the plush rope had been thrown across the entrance to the dining-room; which, so keen is competition for places there, is shortly before one o'clock. If you know where this place is, why, of course, all right. But nobody has any business to go shouting all over the housetops exactly where it is. People who aren't just naturally by temperament a part of the picture oughtn't to know how to find it. Though it is a perfectly good bet that bunches of them would like to know. But that's just the way so many of these havens of the elect get ruined. A lot of curious "visitors" go piling in right along; the scene soon loses all its authenticity; and shortly becomes bogus altogether. Why, I can remember when artists--painters and writers--lived in Greenwich Village. There, in those days.... But all that was years ago. This much only will I tell you about the location of the most _distingué_ place there is in which to have luncheon. The centre of the inhabited world is, of course, Longacre Square, that widened curving stretch of Broadway looking north several blocks from the narrow stern of the gracefully towering Times Building, rising from its site of a bit of an island surrounded by four surging currents of traffic. A few miles away (from Longacre Square) the provinces begin. But there, the most gleaming spot on this our globe under the canopy of the purple night, is the quintessence, the apex of human life.... I am here speaking, of course, in the spirit of those of that nomad race whose hopes for gold and fame lie through the "stage entrance"--I mean the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre.